Brock Vs. Roxanne
Long time Pokemon fans have taken to decrying the difficulty of recent Pokemon games. Or the lack thereof. In some respects, that loss of difficulty is tangible. If you’ve played Pokemon for twenty years then it’s quite simple to blow through the more recent games. There’s less grinding required in the newer Pokemon generations, and the level curves are much less steep than they were in the first two times around. But difficulty in Pokemon isn’t dictated only by numbers, what about the order of the gym leaders, the Pokemon you can catch and the moves they can learn? What about tutorials and your grasp of the game mechanics? Maybe parts of the growing gripe stem from Game Freak’s slow and steady improvement in these facets, and the past has been tinted by nostalgia glasses.
Pokemon Red and Blue present you with a choice early on that could make or break your first big boss battle. It’s the iconic starter decision. Professor Oak rescues you from your untimely demise at the hands of the tall grass at the beginning of the game and offers you one of three Pokemon. The fire, grass, and water starters are meant to teach you about the type effectiveness mechanic that Pokemon is so well known for, but, unfortunately, they sort of don’t at all. You don’t earn an elemental move until the game has moved past Tutorial Town, so your first several battles are a tackle fest. Even though your rival picks the Pokemon with a type advantage against your sweet baby Squirtle, (you did pick Squirtle right?) that choice doesn’t really affect you until much later in the game, when you’re building teams and learning to cover bases. It’s a great little decision to build the recurring miniboss so the player isn’t able to pour all of their experience points into their perfect and beautiful Blastoise, but that will be a discussion for another time.
Beyond giving the player a Pokemon they’re likely to become attached to over the course of the adventure, the starter selection also acts as a sort of unwitting difficulty selection. Bulbasaur can muscle through the first three gyms with ease, giving you time to build a team you like, and experiment with different Pokemon. Squirtle only really starts having trouble when you’ve started to gain your footing and you’re ready to face The Lightning American, and poor Charmander is shut out by Brock as soon as you think you’ve gotten the ball rolling. A player that picks Charmander gets to plow through the first few routes of the game with ember; everything in Viridian Forest is burned right up, netting you easy experience. But upon making it to the other side of the dark maze, Brock stonewalls the fire lizard.
There are a really only two strategies here: you can either grind until Charmander’s not very effective fire moves do a larger chunk of damage, or you can go back and find a Pokemon that’s better suited to Brock’s hefty boys. Grinding isn’t hard, of course. You just go back into the forest, and give Smokey the Bear a heart attack. The type advantage makes it easy to rack up experience. But maybe you don’t want to beat your head against Caterpie all day. Rounding out your team for the battle is a little tough in Red and Blue. The available Pokemon by this point in your journey are: Rattata, Pidgey, Spearow, Mankey, Nidoran♂/♀, Weedle, Caterpie, and Pikachu. None of these Pokemon, at a reasonable level, learn a move that will give you an advantage, and if Brock had rock type moves, many would be weak against him. If you happened to pick up Blue Version it would be relatively simple to pick up a Caterpie and use Butterfree to take advantage of the gym’s meager special stat, but if you have Red Version this requires either poking around in the grass hoping to run into the much less common Caterpie, or running with the abundant Weedle you find, only to discover Beedrill’s moveset is useless against Brock.
In Pokemon Yellow, Game Freak fixes this problem by giving you Pikachu as your starter, adding in a few wild Pokemon encounters, and entirely overhauling a few movesets. Pikachu is almost completely ineffective against Brock, but this change means that no person starting their Pokemon adventure in yellow has a radically different experience than another. This means the first Pokemon handed to you can’t become a game breaking powerhouse right out of the gate. This also means that you have to learn how to cover your bases early on, and Game Freak added in the tools required for this task. The best example of this being the Nidoran families. In Red and Blue on Route 22 you have about a 40% chance of finding either of the pair of Nidoran, and even then the earliest they would learn double kick, the only super effective move any Pokemon you can catch before Brock will learn, is at level 43, and in Generation I that means waiting until you’re almost finished with the game to learn a pretty mediocre move. In Yellow and beyond this is changed to level 12, which is right about where you’ll be upon facing Brock. Mankey is also added to Route 22, cranking your chances of running into a Pokemon that will learn a fighting move to 80%. The moveset for Butterfree is also slightly tweaked. Confusion is gifted to you upon evolution, and now the trainer immediately has access to a neutrally effective special attack that will shred through the abysmal special defenses of Brock’s team, and leveling up to be on par with Brock’s team will also grant poison powder and stun spore.
Generation II backs away from this issue entirely by introducing a gym leader that’s neutral to your starters and most of the early route Pokemon, but Generation III tries the early rock gym again. On the surface, Roxanne presents the same problems to a player picking a fire starter. But this time around the choice isn’t a blind opportunity to arbitrarily make the game harder. Hoenn offers a wider range of available Pokemon in its early game routes. By the time the player reaches Roxanne they could reasonably have four different Pokemon with an advantage over the rock type gym leader. This approach rewards the player for more than just a lucky pick. The starting area is full of Pokemon of different water and grass types; there’s even a water/grass type. Even if somehow you’ve made it to Rustboro without filling out your roster or picking the “wrong” starter the gym doesn’t stand as a frustrating roadblock. It is more of a teaching moment than it was in Red and Blue, because adjusting your team is, frankly, more feasible. The strategies here are similar to Red a Blue: either evolve your starter and learn a fighting move, or turn back and catch a Pokemon with an advantage. Most players will probably just turn back and find a new partner, they’re much more abundant than in Red and Blue, and this teaches an “unlucky” player that Pokemon is more about team synergy than brute force.
Pokemon over the years has obviously grown and changed, but it’s always done so for the better. Maybe the ease of the games is really more of a trimming of fat. Generation I has some difficulty spikes that result in grinding if the player doesn’t know what to expect, but even before making Generation II Game Freak has addressed those problems, and made the games more satisfying to learn about through play. Simplicity and accessibility it not always a bad thing. Sometimes this simplicity is really just an opportunity for the players to learn how to play an intricately designed game. Role playing games are at their worst when the game slams on the breaks and strong arms the player into grinding. There are still elements Pokemon could improve on. The AI is a little simple for how complex Pokemon’s strategy really is, hidden stats, and lack of mechanical transparency has always plagued the series. But stepping back and honestly assessing the changes Pokemon has made over the years shows that they’ve remained on top for a reason.
