>>58582170yeah, probably they could have and that would have been a better choice. here's the thing, "Gamefreak made some poor/amateur choices developing the games" and "Onix was designed purposely as a first boss" are not mutually exclusive options. it's quite common for the early stage of a game to have a higher level of care put into it than the later stages, because those early stages are worked on for a longer time and is usually polished to act as a proof of concept, while late game content is often rushed to meet release deadlines, so you start to see more haphazard design choices towards the end of a game.
another possibility is that they thought between Machamp, Hitmonchan, Hitmonlee, Bruno was already strong enough and wanted to give him some fodder so he wasn't TOO difficult. which does sound silly because the game is very easy anyway, but this was their first attempt at balancing an Elite Four, and again with it being the late stage of the game it probably didn't have as much balance testing as other areas. so on paper, that might have made more sense to them.
at the end of the day, any reason for Onix's poor stats is just speculation unless we get another leak with early design documents proving one way or the other, but I just don't think that any of this is a sound argument against Onix being designed as a first boss.
>>58582196>you need to beat Misty to get a usable Cut.oh yeah that's true, I forgot about that, but still like you said there's lots of places you can grind to outlevel her, so it does still offset her having such strong Pokemon.
