>>57049979This kind of touches on something I've always thought, which is that its very weird how the trainers east of Ecruteak are overall weaker than the one's to the west.
Its fine enough to have both be accessible before Morty, but there's so much pushing the player to go west first that they should've balanced it with that in mind. The western routes are perfectly open, and are numbered before the eastern ones, while route 42 is blocked by water that you can only get around by trekking through a cave that requires flash - an HM you get in an optional dungeon, to use in an optional cave, multiple gym earlier - in order to navigate it. With all these soft-roadblocks nudging the players away from progressing east, its weird that they seemingly expected players to push past it all in order to check out these areas before doing anything else.
