Pokémon, Experience, and Erratic Difficulty Curves

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.