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Is Pokemon getting too easy?

Whether the games are purposefully becoming too easy on purpose or not, this is starting to look like more and more about personal preference than anything else. But if it is being dumbed down on purpose, they should come up with a better excuse than "people don't have time to play games". I feel that time management on playing these games is something that should be left up to the consumer's choice, not the game developers. I've always thought that any game developer in general would want people to enjoy their games for a long time, so what's their deal? Even if people don't have large amounts of time to play a game(and in my personal opinion, if somebody spends too much time playing games than anything else, then they seriously need to re-evaluate their priorities in life), they can still find little amounts of time here and their to play games of any difficulty level. With X and Alpha Sapphire, I would limit myself to about 20-30 minutes a day and I was just fine with it.
 
Not sure if it's been said yet, but I think there's two factors at work in regard to the difficulty of games within the Pokemon franchise. Firstly, as I can see many of you have said, the games do seem to be dumbed down a bit in the more recent years. GameFreak did definitely simplify many aspects of the game, for better or worse. However, the easily overlooked second factor is that just as the games would seemingly be devolving, we as players are also evolving to further simplify the games. Not to say that I don't do stupid stuff still from time to time, but the reality is that if we all were to somehow give a 3DS to our younger (and in my case, child) selves and let them try to play ORAS or X and Y blind, while it may be easier in some ways, it is very unlikely that they would have the same ease as we currently do. Unfortunately it's almost an unavoidable factor, since we all are continually growing as individuals.
 
To me personally, i would remove the Shift option. This right here pretty much throws most of the challenge out of the window by telling which pokemon the opponent is going to send out and if you want to switch out to have better matchup.
 
Not sure if it's been said yet, but I think there's two factors at work in regard to the difficulty of games within the Pokemon franchise. Firstly, as I can see many of you have said, the games do seem to be dumbed down a bit in the more recent years. GameFreak did definitely simplify many aspects of the game, for better or worse. However, the easily overlooked second factor is that just as the games would seemingly be devolving, we as players are also evolving to further simplify the games. Not to say that I don't do stupid stuff still from time to time, but the reality is that if we all were to somehow give a 3DS to our younger (and in my case, child) selves and let them try to play ORAS or X and Y blind, while it may be easier in some ways, it is very unlikely that they would have the same ease as we currently do. Unfortunately it's almost an unavoidable factor, since we all are continually growing as individuals.

This.

My 7-year-old brother is playing X, and the only knowledge he has is what he learned from the anime. He's moving along fine, but from time to time, he's needed my help to do the simplest things, like how to exit a gym after defeating the leader or defeating a normal mook on the road. He's also made some very dumb mistakes because he's playing blind; for example, he released his starter Pokemon on accident, and most of his team doesn't have moves stronger than 60 base power. Heck, he didn't even know how to use evolution stones!

There's a definite shift in difficulty after a player has mastered the basic concepts of the game. I don't really think the games themselves have much to do with this; we're just too prepared.
 
Don't forget, also, that younger players are less likely to post on forums. I notice there's this assumption made across various Pokémon media that forums are representative of players/viewers of the media. Considering that I started out at Gen I, it's odd for me to see people referring to Gen IV with the same kind of "first steps" nostalgia. Give it another few years and you'll get the same reaction for Gen V as well. It just goes to show that the strength of the franchise isn't in trying to cater to the older players during the main story

That being said, it wouldn't hurt for a Hard/Challenge/whatever mode to be introduced from the start of the game. When it comes to the dumbed down aspects of the games, it's notable that a lot of them are either optional or just streamlining something that you could do with a wiki open anyway. I mean, the bitching about Exp. in Gen VI baffles me. I would have killed for quick grinding like that back in Gen III (Sorry, but the VS Seeker was worse in every way)
 
I don't really think the games themselves have much to do with this; we're just too prepared.

This is pretty much how I feel. And so to me, it seems like a lot of people complaining about the games being purposefully made "too easy" are either not consciously aware of this, or they are and just don't want to admit it. Because if they did admit it, to some it would equate to saying "I'm too old to be playing Pokémon games".
 
There's a definite shift in difficulty after a player has mastered the basic concepts of the game. I don't really think the games themselves have much to do with this; we're just too prepared.
Exactly.

OR was pretty much a breeze for me; I would have beaten it a lot sooner if I had decided to grind at it. I already had a pretty good idea of what to expect and was prepared well in advance. Hey, I didn't even have trouble with Tate and Liza's underlings--I swept every last one of them with my Golurk.

Once you have the ins and outs mastered, the game won't give you that much of a challenge. Maybe if GF put in a difficulty switch at the beginning, some the veteran players could have a better challenge.
 
Omega Ruby was a pretty challenging for me but I engineered that challenge myself. I was able to mix rotation, exp share and trade boosting to get a good challenge. But looking back on that now the most challenging part was the start of each party change. We all saw that masuda interview right no doubt the games are getting easier. and while the games were easy that weren't unfailable. Compare an earlier game in a Nuzlocke to a gen 6 game in a Nuzlocke. I had a pretty hard time with White 2's normal mode on my first playthrough. Cheren I say is one of the toughest gym leaders in pokemon history. Trust me the dude's tough I restarted over a dozen times to get genesects. It's fucking hard man.
 
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I like how a few in this thread have noted that the games aren't just easier, most veterans have just gotten older and have a better game-sense. And even then, it's not entirely bad, there are a thousand ways to create your own challenges in Pokemon. The easiness is just about my favorite part of Pokemon. 8U
 
I can't really sign the whole "gamers have just gotten older" statement, 'cos even it's true to some lengths, the effect will stop at some point. I don't really play the games any differently now than I did when I was for example 15 (which was over 7 years ago) - and it does feel like Pokémon games have certainly become easier. Especially in XY, I had to be careful and skip some of the trainer battles or otherwise my team's levels would've been far greater than my opponents', and that happened even without Exp. Share which I turned off quite immediately. I think the Exp. Share would've been fine, if they hadn't also eased up the game in other sections as well. Then people who prefers easier game play, could just turn on the Exp. Share, while the game would offer a little bit of a challenge to those players, who prefer to choose so. I personally think it might have something to do with the ways people play games these days. When I was a kid and played Pokémon, I usually played hours straight, but I believe kids these days are more used to playing games during any 5 minute breaks they get between everything else.

Pokémon games have never been really challenging, but I think the main difference between Red and Blue to X and Y is that in RB you occasionally had to stay behind a bit and grind your team's levels up or use a bit of strategy (not anything special, just basic knowledge lol) against those opponents who had higher level pokémon than yours. That at least was my most recent experience in Pokémon Blue, where I was pleasantly surprised, when Koga's Pokémon were on higher levels than my pokémon. I can't still call it a real challenge, but it was still a bit more exciting.
 
Old Pokemon games can be hard, since you learn attacks later. For instance, your starter has no elemental attacks until lv.7-8, while in new games it usually has it from the start. But at the same time, opponents also have less strong attacks. Like in GS, I remember that the final boss used quite weak attacks, and it was easy to defeat him, despite his high level.
 
I blasted my way through with my delphox and froakie i got from wonder trade T-T Blasted is the word, they never took more then 3 damage........ XP ik i'm Op
 
To be honest i'm not actually sure- or if I'm just getting older. My first game (diamond) I never actually defeated the league. My next game (white) and the one after that (white 2) I completed but only after a good few months of game play. With x though, i completed it in about 8 days and my AS got completed in 4 days- the delta episode after another 1 day. I still can't really tell if i'm just getting better, but i'd say they are getting easier. Even now when I replay diamond i find it a lot harder than the later games. I think the gym leaders and E4 have just become weaker. I remember how I used to take hours to finally defeat the gym leader because their Pokemon were so high leveled. Now i can make it through the whole game without blacking out. I think game-freak are definitely trying to make the games easier- possibly to try and attract a younger audience. But it is very annoying :-(
 
I feel like the games have definitely gotten easier. The change to the experience gain after battle (even after catching too), the Exp Share acting a little like how the old Exp All used to work and being able to use the DexNav to reliably find rare Pokemon all reduce the difficulty of the games quite a bit. I wouldn't say that its a bad thing though, I personally play to finish the story as soon as I can to start breeding/trading/battling with other payers as opposed to the in-game trainers. I think a challenge mode like the one that could be unlocked in BW2 would not have been a bad thing either. At the end of the day, I don't think anyone has time for a real grind of a campaign with so many Pokemon to catch and train once it is over.
 
I like to train ALL my pokemon, so the Exp. Share would be greatly appreciated on my older games. I swap out with pokemon in the computer all the time so i never have just one 'team' but i always carry a flier and usually a water-HM user. Fortunately Fly, Surf and Waterfall are good moves i don't mind distributing on lots of 'mon. I've got very few lv. 100 mon and they're all legendaries that are captured at high levels anyway. Exp. Share isn't bad for making things easy depending on how you use it.
 
The change of catching pokemon giving you experience provides another way to end annoying battle as well as making wonderspamming more rewarding (don't judge me I do late areas). The down side is when you combine that with the fact that expierence no longer divides you got a problem even without exp. share. It encourages the player to have loads of pokemon when lots of trainers including admins have less than four. By all means make QOL changes but adjust for there impact.
 
there is a hole when you look at that that we have no pokemon immune to special or one to physical category.
The game would be harder if they would make gym leaders pokemon level and stat be depending on your own when battling them.
 
Is Pokémon getting too easy? Lemme answer that question with this.

For those of you who don't wish to wade through hundreds of additional posts for me to get to my point, that is a topic on GameFAQs in which I describe the happenings of my latest Alpha Sapphire playthrough. In order to prove a point, I went through that game with a team of Sunkern, Feebas, Luvdisc, Happiny, Farfetch'd, and Nosepass. No evolutions- sold off the only Sun Stone I got, Feebas never so much as touched a Blue Pokéblock, never got an Oval Stone for Happiny, and I made damn sure Nosepass never leveled up in New Mauville. However, short of evolving my team, I used every other convenience the game threw my way- Pokémon-Amie, readily-available Lucky Eggs thanks to DexNav and wild Pelipper, the Exp. Share, reusable TMs, and so on and so forth. The game proved a bit more of a challenge than one usually sees in OR/AS, but not by much. I only had to use one Revive, during the Champion battle. Compare to the originals where a team including the likes of Blaziken saw me spamming Revives against Steven's Metagross, only allowing me to attack when it was recharging from Hyper Beam use... yeah. I think the answer's pretty clear as to whether Pokémon is getting easier.

On another note, that playthrough was fun. :) Nature Power as a TM is just plain awesome. Say what you will, but seeing a Sunkern pulling off Draco Meteor in space against Deoxys... Damn.
 
Yup. Even without an experience share, the trainers have mostly small teams. They give OP crap like Mega Lucario to you for free. I remember the 10 year old me, trying a million times to beat the Sinnoh E4. It's kinda sad when you realized how much the difficulty dropped since then.
 
Please note: The thread is from 9 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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