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Pokémon, Experience, and Erratic Difficulty Curves
4 years ago
Scribbling nonsense all across the board like jaguars leaping from trees of leather bodices encasing aged withered corpses whose eyes dazzle with the light of one million and three silver satellites flying over Los Angeles hiding illegal immigrants from Irish potato farms built atop the golden ruins of El Dorado filled with demonic Ewoks hurling tremendous tankards of tons of Tylenol at the panda bear ninjas that hide around every corner of the magic square building trying desperately to pull up its skirt and set roots on another cubic square inch of the board upon which I am scribbling nonsense.
I remember, among many, many other things, the uproar that came when it was announced that the EXP Share mechanic in Pokémon Sword and Shield was going to be something you couldn’t turn off. It had been an immensely contentious mechanic to begin with when it was introduced in the X and Y, but at least back then you could just choose not to deal with it if you didn’t want to. Now there wasn’t a choice in the matter, you were just going to have to accept that your whole party was going to get inundated with experience all the time.
So…I accepted that.
I frankly don’t understand the majority of the complaints that have come about the mainline Pokémon games becoming “too easy” in the past decade because it almost entirely comes down to decisions the player had to make. If you walked up to Diantha with a team in the 70s or 80s, did it just never occur to you that you could have turned off the EXP Share? If you’re obliterating everything in your path with your Mega Latios/Latias, maybe you shouldn’t have made the conscious decision to put it into your party and tap the mega evolve button every single battle? If you download a Torchic or shiny Beldum with their respective mega stones or a level 100 legendary and put them on your party at the start of the game, what outcome were you expecting to result from that? You don’t have any right to complain about not having enough of a challenge if you’re actively going out of your way to make it not a challenge. Lots of games have options that will let you cheese vast swathes of gameplay, but it’s entirely the player’s choice to use them or not. This isn’t even something new to Pokémon, all the way back in Red and Blue you could have an Alakazam sweeping everything you come across, and since Gen 3 there has almost always been an option for some Olympus Mon you can catch leading into the endgame.
Now, I admit, working around the permanent EXP Share in SwSh was a lot trickier, but it was still doable. Just have a rotating selection for your team. If you think one of your Pokémon is too high of a level, swap them out for a while. The fact that you can access the PC from anywhere almost makes me feel like this was the intended way to play the game. And this has a dual benefit in that it gives you the flexibility to play around with more Pokémon than you might have otherwise, you have more freedom before you have to commit to the six that will make up your final team. I feel this is a lot more in the spirit of what it should mean to be a Pokémon trainer, to mix and match with a variety of Pokémon instead of just focusing to a select few. Consequently, I don’t remember ever being egregiously overleveled throughout the gym challenge, each town presenting a jump of a modest few levels, and so grinding was never an issue.
…But then something happened.
I got to Wyndon and came into the Marnie battle being nearly 10 levels higher than her team. I legitimately don’t know and can’t remember how this happened, I didn’t do any battles beyond the few trainers along Route 10 and catching a few wild Pokémon. I saw someone else playing the game and they had a very similar level disparity when they got to this point. It certainly didn’t help though that Marnie’s team is on comparable level to Raihan’s gym, and from that point on the levels don’t get much higher. The interlude with Macro Cosmos saw me fighting Pokémon that were comparable or lower level to the teams of Marnie and Hop, so I was just getting yet more experience while fighting teams that I effortlessly ground beneath my heels, giving me even more of a buffer when I got back to the stadium for the finals.
And then, after all that, going through Rose and Eternatus, I came up to Leon…and he was higher level than me! Where were all these levels before this??? It made Leon a decent challenge, but was it worth making everything that came before him a pushover? That was my experience in Shield, a game that offered a comfortable difficulty curve through most of its run before suddenly turning into a cakewalk at the very end.
Then in the past month I played Shining Pearl, which turned into a cakewalk before I was halfway through the game.
There is so, so much that I could go into about Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, but for the time being I’m just going to be focusing on the experience that I had with level curves over the course of the game. As with SwSh, I was conscious of what I would have to deal with in terms of the EXP Share, I was ready to play around with my team. For most of the early game, things were working out pretty fine, I was playing smoothly up to Eterna City. Gardenia proved to be a challenge, but I was surprised when I got to Jupiter and found that her team was lower level (and her Skuntank was way less nasty because it didn’t have Night Slash). This would turn out to be a premonition of things to come. I went through the long trek to Veilstone, and the trainers didn’t have Pokémon breaking out of the low 20s, so after a while I naturally swapped out my Pokémon to keep them from getting too overpowered. Imagine my surprise when I got to Maylene’s gym and discovered that the Pokémon there were all in the mid-to-high 20s, with her Lucario at level 30. So I actually had to do some grinding for the first time in a long while, and this gym proved to be a pretty big challenge, and now my main team was hovering around level 30.
After that, I left Veilstone and I discovered that the trainers on route 214 had gone back to being in the low 20s. In fact, all of the trainers in that circuit around Hearthome are in that range. Wake’s gym in Pastoria had Pokémon that were the exact same level ranges as Maylene’s, but by that point I was significantly higher level than him so I didn’t have any problem wiping the floor with him. I had to swap to my B team for the whole detour to Celestic Town just to give my main team a break. All that just to get hit with a difficulty spike in the middle of the Hearthome gym, with all of its trainers being in the high 20s, then Fantina suddenly having a team with a level 32, 34, and 36, all of which were speedy attackers with wide coverage.
That would be the last curve ball for a while. I was consistently overleveled for the rest of the game and plowed through just about every encounter. Even the last three gym leaders and the final Team Galactic encounters were pushovers, only Palkia posed some difficulty because of its power and having Aqua Ring. Even with skipping several trainers, I still vastly overpowered my rival at the Pokémon League and everything along the way.
Then…the Elite Four was fucking brutal. Even Aaron wasn’t a pushover, tanking some of my strongest hits and dishing back heavy blows in turn. Flint and Lucian took out several of my team and I had no easy answers for some of their Pokémon. I was pissing myself thinking how I’d handle Cynthia, I knew there was almost certainly nothing I had that could stand up to her Garchomp. In the end, the only solution I came up with was to put out my Roserade and, for what might have been the first time in my career of playing these games, pump up on X items to the point of being able to tank any hit (while praying for no crits) and one-shot anything I had a type advantage on.
I suspect that the primary intent with the change to the EXP Share was an attempt to mitigate grinding. Now your whole team can gain experience, you don’t have to worry about juggling one party member more than any of the others, and it’s a lot easier to train up Pokémon from a low level so you aren’t stuck carrying dead weight. As a result, I don’t remember any major points of contention with having to sit around grinding for hours and hours from Gen 6 onward like I had to do in the games before that point. This, however, only works if the opponents that you’re facing are consistently getting stronger to match you. In SwSh it mostly worked up until the end of the game, but in BDSP the level curve gets thrown out the window almost immediately because it wasn’t sufficiently altered from the original games to account for the new changes, with the disparity getting worse and worse up until the literal end of the main story when finally you get five battles in a row that increasingly test your limits because they overcompensated at the last minute.
EXP Share in of itself is not a problem. EXP Share is a problem in the way that it exacerbates problems the games already had. They’re trying to make the experience less taxing, but it always inevitably runs into roadblocks. They wanted Leon to be a suitable final opponent, so they had to try to mitigate the odds that you’d come to him overleveled by making the trainers before him significantly weaker. This played out all over again with the endgame of BDSP but even more extreme. In both cases they significantly overcompensated. The best attempt to play with difficulty thus far was in Sun and Moon through the Totem Pokémon battles and similar encounters like eldritch Lusamine, but that was innovation and we can’t be bothered to keep with something like that for more than one generation. I don’t really have any solutions because it seems like the solution ought to be the obvious one: just maintain some level of consistency so your players don’t start defeating opponents by sneezing on them and there’s no risk of a sudden massive difficulty spike. Yes I want Cynthia to step on me but I want to at least stand a chance.
So…I accepted that.
I frankly don’t understand the majority of the complaints that have come about the mainline Pokémon games becoming “too easy” in the past decade because it almost entirely comes down to decisions the player had to make. If you walked up to Diantha with a team in the 70s or 80s, did it just never occur to you that you could have turned off the EXP Share? If you’re obliterating everything in your path with your Mega Latios/Latias, maybe you shouldn’t have made the conscious decision to put it into your party and tap the mega evolve button every single battle? If you download a Torchic or shiny Beldum with their respective mega stones or a level 100 legendary and put them on your party at the start of the game, what outcome were you expecting to result from that? You don’t have any right to complain about not having enough of a challenge if you’re actively going out of your way to make it not a challenge. Lots of games have options that will let you cheese vast swathes of gameplay, but it’s entirely the player’s choice to use them or not. This isn’t even something new to Pokémon, all the way back in Red and Blue you could have an Alakazam sweeping everything you come across, and since Gen 3 there has almost always been an option for some Olympus Mon you can catch leading into the endgame.
Now, I admit, working around the permanent EXP Share in SwSh was a lot trickier, but it was still doable. Just have a rotating selection for your team. If you think one of your Pokémon is too high of a level, swap them out for a while. The fact that you can access the PC from anywhere almost makes me feel like this was the intended way to play the game. And this has a dual benefit in that it gives you the flexibility to play around with more Pokémon than you might have otherwise, you have more freedom before you have to commit to the six that will make up your final team. I feel this is a lot more in the spirit of what it should mean to be a Pokémon trainer, to mix and match with a variety of Pokémon instead of just focusing to a select few. Consequently, I don’t remember ever being egregiously overleveled throughout the gym challenge, each town presenting a jump of a modest few levels, and so grinding was never an issue.
…But then something happened.
I got to Wyndon and came into the Marnie battle being nearly 10 levels higher than her team. I legitimately don’t know and can’t remember how this happened, I didn’t do any battles beyond the few trainers along Route 10 and catching a few wild Pokémon. I saw someone else playing the game and they had a very similar level disparity when they got to this point. It certainly didn’t help though that Marnie’s team is on comparable level to Raihan’s gym, and from that point on the levels don’t get much higher. The interlude with Macro Cosmos saw me fighting Pokémon that were comparable or lower level to the teams of Marnie and Hop, so I was just getting yet more experience while fighting teams that I effortlessly ground beneath my heels, giving me even more of a buffer when I got back to the stadium for the finals.
And then, after all that, going through Rose and Eternatus, I came up to Leon…and he was higher level than me! Where were all these levels before this??? It made Leon a decent challenge, but was it worth making everything that came before him a pushover? That was my experience in Shield, a game that offered a comfortable difficulty curve through most of its run before suddenly turning into a cakewalk at the very end.
Then in the past month I played Shining Pearl, which turned into a cakewalk before I was halfway through the game.
There is so, so much that I could go into about Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, but for the time being I’m just going to be focusing on the experience that I had with level curves over the course of the game. As with SwSh, I was conscious of what I would have to deal with in terms of the EXP Share, I was ready to play around with my team. For most of the early game, things were working out pretty fine, I was playing smoothly up to Eterna City. Gardenia proved to be a challenge, but I was surprised when I got to Jupiter and found that her team was lower level (and her Skuntank was way less nasty because it didn’t have Night Slash). This would turn out to be a premonition of things to come. I went through the long trek to Veilstone, and the trainers didn’t have Pokémon breaking out of the low 20s, so after a while I naturally swapped out my Pokémon to keep them from getting too overpowered. Imagine my surprise when I got to Maylene’s gym and discovered that the Pokémon there were all in the mid-to-high 20s, with her Lucario at level 30. So I actually had to do some grinding for the first time in a long while, and this gym proved to be a pretty big challenge, and now my main team was hovering around level 30.
After that, I left Veilstone and I discovered that the trainers on route 214 had gone back to being in the low 20s. In fact, all of the trainers in that circuit around Hearthome are in that range. Wake’s gym in Pastoria had Pokémon that were the exact same level ranges as Maylene’s, but by that point I was significantly higher level than him so I didn’t have any problem wiping the floor with him. I had to swap to my B team for the whole detour to Celestic Town just to give my main team a break. All that just to get hit with a difficulty spike in the middle of the Hearthome gym, with all of its trainers being in the high 20s, then Fantina suddenly having a team with a level 32, 34, and 36, all of which were speedy attackers with wide coverage.
That would be the last curve ball for a while. I was consistently overleveled for the rest of the game and plowed through just about every encounter. Even the last three gym leaders and the final Team Galactic encounters were pushovers, only Palkia posed some difficulty because of its power and having Aqua Ring. Even with skipping several trainers, I still vastly overpowered my rival at the Pokémon League and everything along the way.
Then…the Elite Four was fucking brutal. Even Aaron wasn’t a pushover, tanking some of my strongest hits and dishing back heavy blows in turn. Flint and Lucian took out several of my team and I had no easy answers for some of their Pokémon. I was pissing myself thinking how I’d handle Cynthia, I knew there was almost certainly nothing I had that could stand up to her Garchomp. In the end, the only solution I came up with was to put out my Roserade and, for what might have been the first time in my career of playing these games, pump up on X items to the point of being able to tank any hit (while praying for no crits) and one-shot anything I had a type advantage on.
I suspect that the primary intent with the change to the EXP Share was an attempt to mitigate grinding. Now your whole team can gain experience, you don’t have to worry about juggling one party member more than any of the others, and it’s a lot easier to train up Pokémon from a low level so you aren’t stuck carrying dead weight. As a result, I don’t remember any major points of contention with having to sit around grinding for hours and hours from Gen 6 onward like I had to do in the games before that point. This, however, only works if the opponents that you’re facing are consistently getting stronger to match you. In SwSh it mostly worked up until the end of the game, but in BDSP the level curve gets thrown out the window almost immediately because it wasn’t sufficiently altered from the original games to account for the new changes, with the disparity getting worse and worse up until the literal end of the main story when finally you get five battles in a row that increasingly test your limits because they overcompensated at the last minute.
EXP Share in of itself is not a problem. EXP Share is a problem in the way that it exacerbates problems the games already had. They’re trying to make the experience less taxing, but it always inevitably runs into roadblocks. They wanted Leon to be a suitable final opponent, so they had to try to mitigate the odds that you’d come to him overleveled by making the trainers before him significantly weaker. This played out all over again with the endgame of BDSP but even more extreme. In both cases they significantly overcompensated. The best attempt to play with difficulty thus far was in Sun and Moon through the Totem Pokémon battles and similar encounters like eldritch Lusamine, but that was innovation and we can’t be bothered to keep with something like that for more than one generation. I don’t really have any solutions because it seems like the solution ought to be the obvious one: just maintain some level of consistency so your players don’t start defeating opponents by sneezing on them and there’s no risk of a sudden massive difficulty spike. Yes I want Cynthia to step on me but I want to at least stand a chance.
The problem is that, especially in these most recent games, the level ranges are inconsistent, so you can be in a situation where you're comfortable and then all of a sudden the enemies are dramatically weaker, and just as quickly it'll turn around and throw something way higher level than you, so you're either having to slog through weak encounters or getting blindsided by difficulty spikes.
Easy answer is gamers refusing to accept anything differing too much from what they perceive as "proper," and things being "too easy" is an immediate trigger in particular.
So if we suppose then that this is the way that early pokemon was intended to be played - i.e you catch a pokemon you want, it'll usually be much lower level than your party and it will need training to be adjusted which will require hours of grinding, this was kind of a central mechanic to the game. You weren't just playing to win, you were playing to get your dream team. "What's your pokemon team?" being one of the first questions any fellow trainers IRL would ask you, etc.
Then EXP share isn't really ruining the game, it's just taking out one of the more grindy aspects. The game devs recognised that there's only so many generations you can expect people to pour hours of their time training up lil baby pokemon and it would be better if people had a rotating team with more pokemon available to them. That said, perhaps there just wasn't as much to the game as they expected if you took that grind out. Which made the exp curve and difficulty curve of the game harder to adjust for. I think the older pokemon games got it easy because when you ended up facing off against a gym leader 10 levels above your party you just took it for granted that that was the sort of thing that happened. You really never met with a gym leader that *wasn't* higher level than your party unless you had been doing some dedicated grinding. If you take out that grinding, I suppose adjusting for estimating where the player's team will be at exp wise becomes a lot harder
Still, meh. Not gonna lie, i haven't touched a main series game in years, and each weird mechanic makes it less attractive to me. However, spin offs? ooof, They got me there. I am still expecting the new generation Mystery Dungeon, I am gonna pay gold for it.
The real problem is that the series seems completely incapable of sticking to anything. So many things will get tested out for a generation or two and then they're just gone forever. We got two generations out of mega evolutions and one out of Z-moves and now they're both gone, and it's pretty explicit already that dynamaxing won't come back since it's specifically stated to be a unique thing to the Galar region. Regional forms are going to be a toss-up because they're going to have to keep coming up with reasons to bring them back when not in their respective regions, we're already seeing that they aren't present at all in BDSP. Contests keep coming in and out and they're never going to be anything more than a gimmick instead of a valid alternative option for progression. Pokemon keeps trying new things, but all they succeed at doing is alienating people in the process, they never keep at it enough for it to really evolve the formula.
I can also get the thing with Charizard, it has grown really boring. It is just one pokemon that looks like a dragon.
One of the big reasons why its a CF is because there is a ridiculous amount of types and moves that you have to keep on hand with nothing in the past Pokémon games to show which moves were effective or not. I figured that out when i was hit with a pokemon riddle and i ended up forgetting that rock was a type and what it was strong against so when you have so many moves and types, it gets overwhelming to build your pokemon when you need to be using multiple guides and the internet to figure out the optimal build. The inability to even actually swap moves for your Pokémon that they learned means that if you put in a move that's not ideal for your Pokémon and want to go back to their old one, you're fucked. You have to find a move tutor in a specific point in the map and waste time getting to them or hope you have a TM (some are still apparently one-use only in recent gens).
(personal gripe but i'd like to see more Pokémon have the ability to null, absorb, or reflect certian types so that the elemental rock-paper-scissors is more interesting while making the pokemon stand out and feel they're evolving in different ways. The same goes for status aliments by balancing some of the stronger pokemon with weaknesses, resistances, and nulls to certain status aliments)
Adding to the mess is that the moves you get have no indication of how strong they are by name alone. You have to look at the status to see the move description and particulars unlike other games where skills are in tiers so that you can identify which skills are upgrades to the older skills such as Zio>Zionga>Ziodyne (SMT) and Thunder>Thundara>Thundaga (FF). This makes it easier to understand which skills are upgrades where in Pokemon, there's none. Instead, you get a bunch of moves that can all do the same thing but in slightly different ways. Adding to the issues is no damage numbers so you have no idea how much damage you're doing besides watching the health bar. You dont get the satisfaction of min-maxing your Pokémon to see really big numbers which ties into my next point.
The battles in the games are still slow for no good reason as when you use a move like fury swipes, you have to wait to watch the health bar deplete before the next animation plays where other games have done it much faster and smoother. The same story goes for the healing items? Do we really need to see the health bar refill? You also don't have a submenu or indicators that show what buffs/debuffs are active on their respective monters nor do you have any items that can be used to remove debuffs on your pokemon or even a move that removes buffs from the enemy.
This turned more into a rant about pokemon. I think the EXP share is a good thing to have in pokemon but there's so many mechanics that need an overhaul as they exist just to bloat the move pool or make people waste time for doing something that older RPGS have done better and in a more concise fasion.
Accessibility of options for moves has been a problem that ebbs in and out over the generations and varies in intensity for various Pokemon. TMs were made infinite-use in Gen 5, so you no longer have to worry about the one use ever you'll get out of any of the TMs that you can only find one of per save file. Then in SwSh they split them into infinite-use TMs and one-use TRs, with the bulk of the really good moves being in the latter category, but there it wasn't as big of a deal because TRs were pretty easy to get either through Max Raid battles or by buying from vendors with easily acquired watts. In BDSP, however, where all TMs are now one-use, the vast majority of them have to be bought from vendors in the underground, which all charge insanely exorbitant prices that are probably going to have you grinding at the dig minigame for hours on end. Then there's the move relearner, an extremely important service for many Pokemon, but how easily you can access it has varied significantly. A particularly potent example is Alolan Marowak, which through some insane lack of foresight only learns its signature move Shadow Bone before it evolves, meaning you have to wait until you get access to the move relearner to learn it, which in SuMo is at the literal end of the game. SwSh eliminated this problem by putting a move relearner in every single Pokemon Center that works at completely no charge, but then BDSP decided to bring it back by only having a single move relearner that goes back to needing heart scales for payment so get to digging.
I mean, they kind of did have the names arranged to indicate the rising severity of the moves back in Gen 1, when everything was pretty basic and most moves were just damage and maybe chance for a status depending on the type. Ember>Flamethrower>Fire Blast, Thunder Shock>Thunderbolt>Thunder, Bubble>Bubble Beam>Hydro Pump. It wasn't as clear as other games have been, but it was still enough to give you an idea. That's gotten harder and harder to gauge as time goes on though and they add more and more moves with weird secondary effects. There can be a move that does more damage if an ally was fainted in the previous turn, a move that scales off special attack but hits the opponent for physical damage, a move that scales off of the opponent's attack stat, a move that deals more damage when the opponent is holding an item, a move that deals more damage when the user isn't holding an item, a million different variations of Protect, and so on. Still, though, even in other games, it's not like all skills and abilities are immediately obvious. I think it's better to think of them as weapon- or character-based attacks, which tend to be a lot more varied in their naming conventions, than spells.
By "damage numbers" I'm guessing you mean numbers that pop up when you hit something to indicate how much damage it was? That would be a pretty sexy thing to have, admittedly, I'm pretty sure I've seen fan games or fan-made battle systems that do that.
I don't think the games' pace is really egregiously slow anymore, it's not like this is still the Gen 4 days where HP depleted frame by frame and Blissey would take thirty seconds to die, and you can always turn off battle animations if you really want them to go by quicker, though even that doesn't help the multi-hit moves. It's mostly a problem when you have to factor in additional text like the reminder that a move is super effective or a critical hit, and when additional effects proc.
Pokemon is a fine enough system but it's really barely changed that much since its inception, and now it's having to deal with the increasingly severe crunch of its development cycles as it becomes more and more bloated. I'm really hopeful for the upcoming Legends game, but I don't know how much of a difference it will make, because they're barely willing to make innovations, and usually what few innovations they do try get thrown out sooner or later.
But like you said, the game developers didn’t adjust the standard trainer levels to account for the new mechanics. To be fair-ish, they were under major crunch time….but even then….