Editorial: Pokemon should be harder. Open world makes this complicated.

For the longest time, people have been asking for an open-world Pokemon game where you can do everything out of order, and explore to your heart’s content. People dreamed about playing the games like how Ash lives out his journey in the Anime. It seemed like an appealing proposition, and now that we are getting there, I regret everything.

Pokemon’s difficulty is laughably low. Even in classic Pokemon games, it was very easy to defeat gym leaders who did not even have a full team of 6 Pokemon, especially with how easy it is to prepare with type advantages in mind. Without a challenge to push back against you, there really isn’t any satisfaction in prevailing against these characters at all. People will say “It’s a game for children, it should be easy”, and I argue that this is a preposterous notion.

On one hand, it is patronizing to assume that children lack the ability to learn and improve, especially with how their brains are extremely good at gathering and processing information. Furthermore, Pokemon fans skew far older than the target demographic, and as such, adding a difficulty setting would simply fix the issue. There is no reason to not have it there, and Pokemon Black 2 did in fact add this option, so it is not a new concept. However, I argue that even this solution would not be quite enough to offset the impact of an Open World Pokemon experience.

Having an open-world game means that:

1. It is possible to catch a wide variety of Pokemon before a gym, and build an entire team tailored to take down a specific gym leader. In classic games, you were limited to a pool of available Pokemon, and needed to choose them more strategically.

2. Exploring means, it is extremely possible to overlevel. Older games having many areas gated means that while it was possible to grind, it was time-consuming. In Sword and Shield, it was possible to grind on strong Pokemon and in dynamax dens extremely quickly. I was 20+ levels above the first gym leader just because I had explored the entire area.

3. Held items and money can be grinded ad-nauseum.

Some solutions can “help”, but may not even be enough:

1. Have gyms scale with your level up to a certain degree. Clearly, being able to grind is a good thing to let people of multiple skill levels be able to beat the game. However, the gym leaders should still never be too low below you. An easier mode could scale, but allow you to be a good few levels above the gym leader. A harder difficulty should not let you be more than a small handful of levels above them, and a hardest level should scale very close to your own level.

2. Gym leaders shouldn’t just be type-dependent anymore. Instead, they should focus on combat strategies and have better AI. It would be much harder to trivialize a gym if a character uses a Trick Room build, sets up weather conditions, or mixes Earthquake and flying types / levitate. These could be countered through preparation, but the solution would no-longer be to send 6 fire types at the grass-type gym-leader.

3. Hard mode should add some EVs and IVs in relevant stats. They don’t need to be maxed out, but the Pokemon should not be pushovers.

More can be done, but these tiny details would help a lot. It still wouldn’t fix the problem of being able to over-prepare, but it would mitigate some of it. Furthermore, the abundance of choice wouldn’t replace the concept of working with a limited pool of resources available to you and making the best of it.

I’m not saying that open-world can’t be done right, but it comes as the cost of the classic Pokemon style. It’s similar to how some feel let down by Breath of the Wild potentially marking the end of the classic 3D Zelda formula. Both are valid styles with ups and downs, but when one replaces the other, it leaves a gap that is not so-easily-replaced.

I have not enjoyed Sword and Shield, and am not exactly excited for Scarlet and Violet. I could change my mind, but not much seems to be done to add even a modicum of challenge. A single difficulty setting toggle would go a long way.