Um, hi everyone. I just started playing Reborn about three weeks ago, and am currently up to the Crustle puzzle. The slowdown + night time color have combined to give me an actual physical headache, so I've decided to stop playing until tomorrow morning. Reading through the topic, I see those two issues will be addressed soon, which is good.
This is pretty much the hardest Pokemon game I've played by far, but it's a very fair kind of difficulty. I've honestly never played any Gen 5/6 games, so many Pokemon are rather new to me. A lot of the things I've wanted to say have already been addressed earlier in the thread, but there's one issue I feel that I should comment on. The low level issue. Know that this is my first playthrough, so what I have to say about Reborn should be based on that. Things are obviously much easier on subsequent playthroughs, if one decides to restart and play through again.
On one hand, I don't see that much of a problem in having Pokemon that are usually seen as endgame or high tier metagame material join late in the game at low levels, since I already realize this game is all about effort. However, I felt that from the Wasteland onwards, several factors had combined to make grinding up the new members of your team increasingly tedious.
I mean that for one, there's a big difference between being given a Lv. 10 Mareep when your team is around Level 20-25, and a Lv. 10 Ralts when your team is in the 45-50 range. (Or a Lv. 3 Audino that I ran into in Route 1, is that Pokemon so good to warrant them being in the wild at such a low level when the rest of your team is level 50-60? It's not a Pokemon that evolves either, does it?)
Also, I noticed a sharp decrease in the amount of trainers to fight in general after that point. That means less EXP to go around, I had to begin fighting tons of wild Pokemon for the EXP to keep up. It's a rather jarring and very sudden shift in design. That coupled with the certain new Pokemon joining at very low levels is rather off-putting.
To understand where I'm coming from, let me describe my entire playthrough thus far. In general, I've never hit the level caps, and never used Common Candy for anything other than de-leveling Pokemon for the purpose of learning moves. Although my whole team was usually within 4-7 levels of the cap when fighting the gym leaders, and that's after fighting everything I could and doing a bit of grinding off of wild Pokemon.
Beginning to Second Badge
Second Badge to Apophyll Island
Wasteland to Route 2
