>>86347376Yeah, this felt weird to me too since as early as og pokemon red/blue.
This is clearly an incorrect way to play the game, that devs didn't intend to be played by default, since they have this elaborate rock-paper-scissors system of counters (heavily tied to the lore btw). It could've been easily fixed by replacing it with a hard counter system, in which your lv60 starter Blastoise would be useless against a lv30 grass pokemon, and that would be enough to force it. Or you could have an exponential exp leveling curve that would prevent power creep. They even had the right idea with attacks having power points (pp) and stronger ones having less of them, but they executed it in such a way that it only starts to be a problem in late game and it can be worked around - which people will have to do, if they've trapped themselves by investing in only one pokemon through the game. They could've also made it in such a way that some of the trainers don't fight you just a single time (but e.g. are on a cooldown), which would block you from carving your path through them by repeated fights, and could've been integrated into the puzzle aspect of the game of how to find your optimal path (and mon's party composition) through the trainers on the roads.
There is this concept of "protecting player from himself", where game designers tweak the game in such a way to keep player from playing the game how players think it should be played, and forcing them to play it how the designer intended to.
Early RTS games had this problem where players would be basebuilding and constructing big army blobs for a single finishing push. Which is comfy in it's own way, if you're playing Sim City, but it's a very passive way to play an RTS in which there is way more potential in dynamic, active play. Then Starcraft came with its nerfed base defenses, simple basebuilding and rush mechanics (also tied to the lore) and taught generations of players how RTS games should've been really played.
This all looks to me as if at a relatively late stage of design or early development someone came in to the room and said "make it so that even the dumbest kid you've known in the 1st grade could finish it", and it stuck with all the later games. Which is why so many people are looking forward for pokemon competition, because they want to be freed from those old Nintendo paradigms
