Not intentionally, which is why I mentioned the difficulty curve being weird. I just did the research and requests per area before moving on. I can only imagine deciding to catch and fill out a pokedex entry before changing areas is the culprit when you got alphas like 30 levels higher than normal roaming around the areas. I farmed up that level 60 Alakazam before leaving the first area.Originally Posted by Spinach
That's on you lol, play the game more moderately and the curve is very consistent and reasonable. But even if this game was a cakewalk and the final boss had a team of lvl 30 baby pokemon I'd still call this game more fun than any mainline game from previous gens, the exploration and catching mechanics are massively more enjoyable than anything the old games have ever offered.
Filling out the dex and taking requests as they are available seems like a reasonable or even expected thing to do. Not accounting for that throwing off your game progression seems a bit poor on the development side is what I'm saying. Gigaton balls were fun but I didn't feel like catching was revolutionary or anything. It feels like just playing with quick balls in a normal game since you can mostly avoid the fight. Just sneak up behind a mon and ball him 90% it works lol. I did like the open world and flute pokemon though. Wish there were more hidden locations or things like the clefairy area or that out of the way flower area with the petili and pachirisu and togepi.
I think that you're more a member of a very small minority of players who'd actively try to max the dex in a given area + complete every request before moving ahead. I have talked to a lot of people about this game and most move to the new zone as soon as their research level permits it. I haven't spoken to anyone but you who did this. Yeah, the game definitely lets you do this, and since completion of the dex (rather, catching every pokemon. Not completing their dex profiles) is the ultimate, final goal to unlock the last battle with Arceus, I don't actually think you're completely unreasonable to do it.
But on the other hand I think it's pretty obvious that it wasn't completely their intention for you to do that. This to me is like saying that it was reasonable to grind all of your Pokemon into the 40s before taking on the first gym leader in any other game because they evolve at lvl 45 or something. Sure, you can do that, but gosh it'd really break the difficulty curve if you did. I'd say that comparing sneak catching things with free-aimed balls to tossing a quick ball on turn 1 in another game is apples and oranges, the gameplay is fundamentally different. You can't tell me in total sincerity that it feels the same to sneak up on something and toss a ball at it in Arceus as it is to run up and down in the tall grass in an older game until you run into the pokemon you want, then hit quick ball. That's like telling me you think that headshotting somebody in an FPS is the same feeling as getting a critical hit in Minecraft.
But yes, I wish there were more hidden areas, off-the-beaten-path locations and secrets to find. There are quite a few, but I only want more because the exploring is so fun that I've run out and unreasonably want more in general.
I won't deny that I'm sort of an excessive completionist but I don't think the gym comparison is fair since here completing the dex and raising your research is thematically your survey corpse main original objective you're tasked with along with meeting all pokemon. I felt like how the dex was completed differently in this game puts it as a major highlight of the game experience. It's also tied into your rank so maybe they should have just tweaked exp and rank scaling. That and gaining the trust of the team by completing their requests instead of letting them build up(Doing them as you get them at least helps make the game feel a bit more alive as you engage with the npcs and see the village develop a bit).
The ball mechanics are different but I didn't really feel like it was anything to write home about? The free aiming part mostly only came into relevance if I wanted to Jet ball something from down town which was almost never. I'm just comparing GBalls to quick balls in my mind because they serve the same purpose to me in allowing you to skip the inefficient parts. I can only pretend I'm stealthily solid snake catching a pokemon so many times before the fact that my character is barely crouching in grass or the pokemon just standing two feet away from me not seeing me gets old. That's why I liked gigaton balls so much. I could just quickly bait some mon and then skip all the bullshit with almost guaranteed success. Alpha and level was irrelevant. I'm not sure that was a good thing though. It's kind of ridiculous how strong those balls are. As soon as I got heavy balls I basically stopped using anything else but upgrades and the occasional Ultra. I think I unlocked all this in the first area(Gigaton upgrades were second or third area I think). Oh yeah, stealth spray was good too. Soon as I got stealth spray I just popped it on and rode up to pokemon on bigdeer from their blind side and balled them in the back because hiding in grass or stealth walking is boring and slow as shit. They probably shoulda made stealth mechanics a little more engaging.
All considered I still thought the game was fun as I originally said. I do think mainline games are more enjoyable. The sheer lack of battles kind of sucked. I recently played through S&S again and it felt like the characters and setting were just a lot better. There was no one in arceus remotely as endearing as Hop for me.
If we're talking grinding stuff, I did grind hard enough that I reached Six Stars before getting to the Coastlands, and my Pokemon were 10-20 levels above most of the wild Pokemon and the Nobles, but I still found the game somewhat difficult, especially since Pokemon 10-20 levels below you can still take out your own Mons if you're not careful or extra tanky.
Key is to just have good type coverage since you can probably ohko anything with a strong super-effective. I'd also recommend having some good 100% acc move like Aerial Ace on a couple pokemon to pick up KO's in case the pokemon used something that makes it harder to hit them.
So what happens if you lose all your pokemon in the wild out of curiosity? Do you black out since you have no pokemon or do you get to run away and head to base camp?
I can only say what I already said, which is that you massively overgrinded. For some scope the gigaton recipe is unlocked at rank 7, which I reached shortly before battling Volo for the last time, and I did not bullrush the story. I explored every zone and tried to find all the wisps, catch every species I saw and left no stone unturned. At a lot of points I felt like I was dicking around TOO much and had to force myself to get back on rails. I also did quite a few of the requests I got as they came in, I only have about 15 sitting around left to do (and they're almost all "complete X pokemon's dex entry" requests).
I honestly think the gym comparison is fairly apt. The goal in the previous mainline games is to raise your team to become the champion, so it sounds perfectly logical to grind your team up to an absurdly high level. That's the point, after all, just like the point in Arceus is to fill out your dex.
On difficulty, I'll be real with you I have played every mainline game when they released since gen 1 EXCEPT S/S because XY, Sun/Moon were so unforgivably terrible that I didn't want to give the company anymore money, and I have to say that this game is actually by far the hardest. That isn't even because this game is particularly hard in the grand scope of things, but because every other pokemon game is childishly easy. The final boss in this game is multiple leagues above anything they've ever forced their players to beat and it's not even close. Of course if you went overboard and grinded your team into the 80s before reaching the last boss it wouldn't seem that way, but you broke the game's progression yourself. If I found a black knight weapon in dark souls and used it to kill Artorias in 8 hits I'd also probably go online and say "huh that was easy," but I'd be wrong (actually I'd be right, but for the wrong reasons, but let me just conveniently use the XD Dark Souls hard game narrative) despite my personal experience being more in line with that.
Of course there is the possibility now that I am overly emphasizing my own experience, which is why I've talked to plenty of other people about it, and what I've found from people that have finished the game is that they had somewhat similar experiences to my own. Which is why I'm even bothering to respond here, to convey that you really shot your own experience in the foot if you thought that it being "too easy" was a negative.
Now for personal opinion stuff but realtalk Pokemon battles in the old system suck anyway and are braindead, especially in the singleplayer experience. Click the effective move and win. The reason people do nuzlockes to milk enjoyment out of these games past their prime is because the system is so simplistic and uninteresting in its singleplayer experience that the only way to get the game to encourage you to think is to apply strict rules on your gameplay.
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You get to run.
I'll be real Spinach, I personally think you undergrinded. I got the Gigaton Recipe by the time I got to the Highlands. Still, he who must still not be named was a bitch to fight, especially in tandem with his ace in the hole.
Yeah, most people I talked to said they were 62 on average for that final battle. I was 55. At the very end of the game as I closed in on that conclusion I started rushing and felt like I was probably a little under the curve, I'm aware. My point is less about how I underachieved in my lategame grinding and more about how ridiculous it is to reach that boss with your team in the 80s. That's more than 10 lvls past his team, which gets double silly when you consider how much XP is needed to go from 70 to 80 compared to going from 60 to 70.
As I said, I got to that battle roughly in the mid-high 70s, and he was still a piece of work. I had a couple Pokemon at Level 80, but it didn't change much. Also, I'm surprised everyone else rushed ahead so fast.
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Didn't fully read the last part, and it's true. I would think the best way to deal with it would be Ingo's trainer battles.
Thanks for the info.
As for the rest all I can say is that the devs balanced it poorly since I did nothing that shouldn't have been expected giving the directives handed out in game. Having to heavily sideline stuff to not steamroll is wack. That's on the devs imo. Maybe they should have cut back on how much xp was given and removed things like gaining xp in gathering or having to catch/battle so many times to complete a page. Everything you do gets you xp.
The gym thing... well, it would be apt if you hit 40 before the first gym just from catching a pokemon of each type and battling all the trainers presented to you. But in reality you'd have to spend how many hours grinding mons you far outleveled? I never went out of my way in Arceus to just fight enemies. Maybe in this kind of game your whole team shouldn't be getting leveled at the same time.
I'm not saying the mainline games are particularly challenging though(It's pokemon lmao). I would say the hardest game was gen 1 just because of shit like rng zubats and geodudes every 2 feet for your charmelon but even that has a limit.
Your experience sounds weird to me Nanaya, because I was also completing every request and filling most of the pokedex before moving on to each area and I was still around the high 60s when I got to the final boss. I didn't read every post but I can only imagine you were catching multiple of Alphas 20 or 30 levels above your or something like that.
Wait, did you just get your entry level to 10 or did you literally fill out every square?
That's how I got really overleveled for most of the game.
Me too, but I just stopped catching Alphas in Icelands and Highlands and that fixed it.
Being overleveled didn't make the post-game boss any easier, or the Space-Time Distortions, or that goddamn Electrode.
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That, and they allowed for easy completion of several Pokedex entries, including Machamp, Electivire, Lucario, and Garchomp.
Oh I'm just talking about the final boss. Post game was brutal even with my lv.85 Alpha Garchomp. Poor Guarulhos was the only one who survived a SPOILER hit and it still wasn't enough. Took me like 5 tries until I realized I shouldn't be killing his mons with strong style moves.
For me, the real MVP of that post-game battle wasy Level 71 Cresselia with Lunar Blessing, an Aux Powerguard and an Aux Evade. She took on the spoiler Pokemon by herself and allowed me to eventually send in my Luxray to paralyze it and finish it off after some lucky paralysis procs.
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That makes more sense. In any case, I'll need to do my own writeup for that battle.
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Also, it doesn't actually matter how you kill his mons because when he switches in, it's his turn anyway.
I'm still thirteen at heart and feel like mocking you for even THINKING about using a Legendary.
Also how the fuck do I get Darkrai.
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But if you kill with Agile he doesn't get instant two turns.
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