The Inevitable Endpoint of Clickbait: Since Media Consumers Tend to Scan Headlines Without Reading the Article, More and More Weight is Borne by Overly-Long Headlines

So there’s that.

Brief Thoughts on Difficulty in Pokemon

It is often regarded as a flaw in Pokemon that the player can beat the game by over-leveling one insanely strong Pokemon.  (In fact, trainer compositions in later games sometimes reward this.)  If the player plays these games “fair” they are usually quite difficult. (1)  If, on the other hand, the player only uses one Pokemon in every single fight, it will quickly grow into a behemoth that can curb-stomp any opponent in the player’s way.  Type differences do not matter when you have a 20 level advantage.

A common take on this design feature is that it is poor design.  Players who wish to play optimally feel compelled to suffer an inferior play experience.  The game played this way lacks a lot of the fun, variety, and charm of the series.  The player will knock out opposing Pokemon in a single blow, meaning no new Pokemon can be captured.  The excitement of learning new moves will be drastically less frequent, and the player will only see one set of moves throughout the entire game.  And so on.

But I question the assertion that this is bad design.  I think it serves a number of purposes.  Firstly, it serves as an organic “easy mode” for newer players.  The fact that a four year old child can play and enjoy Pokemon by using only their cute starter that turns into a cool dinosaur is not a mistake.  Yes, this cuts out monster capturing, but that also means a player does not need to master the nuances of those systems in order to complete the game and get what all the fuss is about.

Furthermore, I argue that it is actually good design insofar as it reinforces the themes of the series.  You can get to know a lot of Pokemon, master their strengths and weaknesses, and build a team out of them, sure.  Or, you can just be super best friends with your favorite one, and the two of you can take on the entire world together and win.  That is perfectly in keeping with the themes and core fantasy of the series.  This is not a design flaw.  It is a well-considered feature, and should remain in the series.

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1. In the earlier gens this difficulty came in the form of long, exhausting gauntlets of trainers and wild Pokemon.  The game alternated routes full of hostile trainers with huge teams and caves with a uniformly ridiculous encounter rate.  In more recent gens this difficulty comes from fiendish gym leader battles that subvert common weaknesses of their type.  In Alola it manifests as game systems designed to intentionally frustrate the player and waste their time.