This week I'm interested to hear people's thoughts on the difficulty level of Pokémon games! Opinions on both current and historical difficulty levels are welcome.

Overall, I'd personally like to see the main series get a difficulty selection at the start of the game or accessible from anywhere. Usually it feels like any challenging content is locked to specific post-game areas, if it exists, or you have to turn to online competitions.

That being said, obviously the series has wide appeal and needs to be accessible to young fans.

Pokémon has tried a convoluted key system in Black 2 and White 2 which allowed for Easy and Challenge modes, but it was too much of a pain to use for new games for most players.

Sound off below! Do you like things as they are or would you prefer more of a challenge or grind?

While personally I’m fine with the current level of difficulty; after all one can always have self imposed rules like nuzlockes if one wants more of a challenge, if they keep open worlds I do wish they would have level scaling depending on badge numbers.

Personally I think if pokemon games are becoming too easy for you, then you should probably branch out into the greater ocean of RPG's.

But if your so deeply against that thought. You have hundreds of pokemon and moves for you to decide your own difficulty, you can even do some silly self-imposed challenge.

FO SURE.

They have always been easy, but I deff think they have gotten easier in recent years. At the same time, they are pretty good about making the post game stuff challenging. I personally hope they scale gyms in the future if they let us do them in any order again

I think they are too easy, but they need to stay accessable to young players. I think the addition of dificulty modes would help a lot, like the ones they tried in gen 5, but with more tweaks and improvements. Overall, smarter AI, items, extra mons, higher levels, coverage moves, etc. Of course, it should be avalible from the start instead of the key system.

Aside from difficulty modes, there should be level scaling in open world games, like higher-level wild pokemon as you progress. Level scaling would also be cool for gym-like story points, so that in games like Scarlet and Violet, you can take on gyms/titans/star bosses in whatever order you want.

Nuzlockes work pretty well for what we have now, but seeing more built-in challenges and difficulty modes could make the game more enjoyable for casual older players who might not know much about nuzlockes, or even long-time fans who want to play without rules about catching or healing!

I am completely happy with the way the games are and really hope there won't be much changes to the base difficulty, because as people said they need to stay accessible to young players (as well as anyone else who may face challenges with gaming in whichever way/reason, like myself lol). But I agree that adding difficulty modes in settings, level scaling, or things like that can be a way to keep the low barrier accessibility that I love so much about the pokemon main series, while also adding more ways for people who want to have fun with challenges

on a related note, it has been almost 3 years and i will forever be grateful for the accessibility feature they added in indigo disk. I was so ready to give up ever proceeding the plot when Amarys let me pass her trial just for the fact i kept trying and failing because that mini game was... really not made for me lol i haven't tried it since getting the switch 2 so i don't know if that changes things, but it was really, really frustrating at the time indigo disk dropped