Kithros

KOed her gengar, used a muk to poison her next pokemon and then venom drench spammed to cripple the next pokemon (using a few potions), then sent out a simple swoobat to calm mind*3 + substitute on the cripple pokemon and sweep (iirc only the mismagius outsped the woobat and the substitute tanked the hit from the mismagius, though it probably could have survived an actual hit too with +6 special defense). Setup sweeping is really easy against all of the gym leaders if you have the right tools for it on your team because the AI is stupid and doesn't know how to switch properly.

I find it really strange that you had difficulty with the giant steelix - I've never found it even remotely difficult, to the point that I've even beaten it 1v1 with one of my pokemon before without even needing the rest of my team. Do you not use any special attackers? A super effective physical attack against a steelix is going to do significantly less damage than a normally effective special attack (assuming attack = special attack at least) - a steelix has ~3x as much defense as special defense. The abra/arceus can potentially be a bit silly depending on RNG and team composition, but the Steelix has pretty much always been a pushover for me regardless of what team composition I was using. I've never needed to go out of my way to build my team for them, but both the Abra and Arceus can be almost trivialized by catching a sturdy magnemite and teaching it thunder wave (+ flash optionally) and the magnemite doesn't even need to leveled up.

I don't see why field effects would need to apply to the entire area - in fact, there are definitely areas with multiple field effects (pretty much everywbere that you can surf for instance), in the Corey gym fight there are 2 different possible fields depending on whether you did a sidequest or not too (so the field effect there can clearly be changed freely) etc..

Pretty much copy/pasted my response from another similar discussion and I still stand by it personally - the long and short of it is that you shouldn't jump to conclusions when you have very limited information about a situation and shouldn't assume that you know better than Taka even though he likely knows much more about the situation than you do (at least, given that there's virtually no risk to you involved and that Taka appears to be helping you)

I think Charlotte got a lot easier with the change from energy ball to solar beam on the typhlosion (since typhlosion isn't legitimately able to learn energy ball) - solar beam is kind of a joke move when it's used outside of the sun and the AI just doesn't understand that.

If I remember correctly, whenever you change your computer clock reborn keeps track of the latest time your computer clock was ever at - if you've ever changed your computer clock far into the future (for instance, while grinding the grand hall trainers..) then you're effectively going to be breaking the weather until you move the clock even further than it was before. I had a problem like this once, but I can't really remember clearly what exactly I did to fix it - I think when I tried switching between different versions of the game it kind of fixed itself.

I'd recommend focusing on Saki first - ignore Venam's pokemon altogether until you've fainted Saki's 3 pokemon, at which point the fight will turn into a 2v1 fight (I recommend beating Saki first because she uses a lot of hard hitting pokemon and you don't really want to just let her do her thing). If you lead with your Blaziken + Pyroar I think you could probably KO the metagross before it moves which should simplify the fight quite a bit.

Don't see the point of it - it introduces an incredibly counterintuitive/cheesy game mechanic (arbitrarily being unable to fight because you have a normal pokemon on your team?) for something that's basically the same as simply not having it in the game until later.

Of course.. but there's still nothing 'lawful' about breaking laws to destroy the city.

I don't think we really know enough about a lot of the characters to really judge their alignments very well (also, the alignment system in general is a horrible oversimplification to begin with - I mean, the alignment system treats people who actively try to keep balance between good and evil and people who just don't really care about it as the same alignment which seems incredibly silly to me for instance). Terra strikes me more as chaotic neutral to me personally - it's not like she's really sadistic or anything. There's no way we can know Shade's alignment, and Solaris' alignment is surprisingly unclear (obviously he isn't lawful being the head of a terrorist organization, but his actual motives don't seem clear enough to make judgments of good/evil etc. to me). There's also a pretty strong argument for El not being lawful given that he's allied himself with a terrorist organization. I don't see any particular reason Florinia should be considered neutral instead of good - she's made pretty much every effort to help in the game.

It was on intense, though I don't think there's any difference at all in that particular fight regardless of the difficulty (maybe on casual it still has lower levels I guess).

You ended episode 14 after beating Terra, which let you use the waterfall HM - the first place you go in episode 15 is the waterfall Amaria and Titania jumped off of a few episodes ago near her house.

I think it makes a lot more sense to fight him personally (at least in the context of the game saying that fighting him is essentially covering his betrayal for him - realistically this doesn't make much sense but that's what the game is saying it is) First off, if you think about it strategically, you're helping keep someone friendly towards you at least somewhat in charge of Team Meteor - it would be a horrible waste to just let Solaris know that Taka is betraying him when Taka could help you more down the road - if they know he's a traitor he's not going to be in any position to help you in the future. More importantly, you have next to no knowledge of the situation, and you should give Taka the benefit of the doubt that he knows more about what's going on than you do, and that if he says you should beat him you should at least trust him a little that if he thinks he needs to fight you that he does need it, given that you risk almost nothing and that he's clearly been trying to help you. Besides, do you know what punishment Team Meteor has for traitors? For all you know not fighting him would be a death sentence for him.

If I remember correctly Julia used Electrode, Fan Rotom (for some reason she also had an air balloon on her fan rotom - I didn't quite undertand that), Magnezone with air balloon, Eelektross, and I'm not sure what the other 2 pokemon were (I think I beat the fight without any more of her pokemon fainting). It's somewhat noteworthy that she actually has a lot of pokemon immune to ground or with an air balloon, so spamming earthquake works quite well for the fight if you're teaming up with Julia.

In the main pokemon games I also had enough money to buy over 200 revives by the time I reached the elite 4, which makes the elite 4 a complete joke - heck, I've even spammed revives to PP stall the opponent at the elite 4 on occasion when I didn't feel like grinding and there was an annoying pokemon for my team (I usually fought the elite 4 about 20 levels underleveled compared to their higher level pokemon). If revives are as plentiful as they are in the main games, then there will be no way to make the game challenging without making the AI use equally cheesy tactics.

I think it's already available with the pickup table, but you'd have to level up beyond the level cap and it's also a very low probability - but technically possible.

In some cases having a NPC team up with you is actually harder than soloing because the AI sometimes completely derps and uses dumb moves, turning it into basically a 2v1 fight - though, in my experience Melia usually doesn't derp that badly so it's probably easier temaing up with Melia in this case, there have been some times in the past where I've felt it would be easier if I didn't need to team up though.

First you need to find Kiki's gravestone in the wasteland and talk to it (this is a step that people very commonly neglect to mention - possibly because a lot of people did it without even realizing that it was important) - before then the strength boulder won't exist at all. Once you've done that you need to go somewhere around the north-west corner of the wastelands, and enter a building/cave/something, and you'll find the strength boulder that can be pushed into a hole. Once you push the strength boulder into the hole it will crush the ordinary rock that you've seen, and you can push it out of the way to reach the gastly event.

I'd definitely be a water gym leader if I were going to be one - water has always been a type that feels way more versatile than most other types (particularly because they practically all have access to ice moves which are super effective against every type that resists water except for water itself, and there are all kinds of dual typed water pokemon). As for the actual team - I'd need to give it a lot more thought before I'd actually decide on what team I'd be using, because frankly I've spent almost no time ever considering it before.

A pokemon with sturdy or prankster and some kind of status move (preferably paralysis) or accuracy debuff is the simplest method for being able to beat him if your current team won't suffice for it. I'd normally suggest getting a magnemite with thunder wave but if you don't already have one I'm not sure it's actually possible to catch one until you're able to return to Reborn City - I think Cottonee is available somewhere after Agate though (not completely sure)? Cottonee can get stun spore and leech seed, with a bit of savescumming you can really easily stun spore turn 1 leech seed turn 2 with the mewtwo getting paralyze haxed on turn 1, at which point you can really easily beat him as long as you have any kind of remotely competent team (truthfully the leech seed shouldn't even be necessary with 5 high leveled pokemon against a paralyzed mewtwo).

Once you get a magnemite this strategy becomes amazingly consistent to be honest - once I got a magnemite I beat both Crawli and Angie (on the highest difficulty, not that the levels of their pokemon really matter very much) on my first attempts using basically the same strategy but with a magnemite instead of a pichu (Angie was more annoying because she leads with abomasnow which kills my sturdy pokemon with hail and also had a priority move which can potentially kill if it hits twice in a row, but still manageable). Level up all of the pokemon at least high enough to outspeed a paralyzed pokemon and lead with magnemite to paralyze them immediately and you can almost always put them down to -6 accuracy too which is really easy to set up against. I even beat the Chandelure event on the first attempt despite the 2 back to back fights, albeit *very* barely (my magnemite was fainted in the first fight which made it immensely more difficult and I couldn't set up fully, I literally had only my woobat left at the end with 1 health and no substitute up when I KOed the chandelure) The downside of course is that it's tedious as hell to fight non-boss fights like this (especially if you can't heal inbetween fights), and also it doesn't work in the slightest in 2v2 fights.

As far as I can tell the AI prefers to send out pokemon in the order that they're in their team (ie. since their ace is the last pokemon it's more likely to be sent out last), but they will always rather send out a pokemon with a super effective move over a pokemon that doesn't have any super effective move, even if it's not the next pokemon they would 'normally' send out (if they have multiple pokemon with super effective moves then they'll send out whichever was closest to being the next pokemon), so if you send out a pokemon that only their ace has a super effective move against then they'll send out their ace. There may be some other considerations for how the AI chooses to send out its pokemon, but that's the thing I've noticed most consistently about the AI (the AI still does all kinds of weird stuff that absolutely confuses me though).

Pretty much this - even an underleveled magnemite has a ton of utility in this game, a magnemite with thunder wave and flash (as long as it's at least high enough of a level to outspeed a paralyzed pokemon) can almost always paralyze and -1 accuracy a pokemon, and can often do much more than that with hax - that's enough to easily deal with the single overleveled pokemon in the game and it even has applications in gym fights for helping a setup sweeper set up.

Think about it this way - what if the game started with you having every pokemon in the game in your PC with 1000 rare candies in your inventory, every TM, and the game had no level limits per badge - do you think that the game would be better if it worked this way? I could use the exact same logic for this - anyone who didn't want to use certain pokemon could choose not to use them, if they didn't want to use the rare candies they could choose not to use them, if they wanted to have level limits they could choose not to level past that level etc. - the game would still become incredibly cheap in spite of having the option of not using these features though, and people would never really come to an agreement of what is/isn't fair to use - that's (part of) the job of the game developer to decide. It's a bit counterintuitive, but a bad feature in a game is worse than a feature not existing, even if the players have the option of completely ignoring it - psychology isn't so simple that you can treat it this way. People don't want to have to handicap themselves - to anyone who likes being competitive games become kind of pointless once you have to handicap yourself in these ways, but playing it optimally is also so stupid that they just stop playing the game altogether (there are a lot of games I've stopped playing because of a feature that I thought was so stupid but necessary for optimal play). It's like how playing a game with cheats will completely ruin a game, even if you have the option to choose when you use the cheats or not - as soon as you start cheating the game's already pretty much finished. EDIT: Oh, you responded to my post before - I guess this post is largely irrelevant then since it's covering mostly the same things. I think if you wanted to have an easier way to play through the game that there are better ways to accomplish that though - it would be a lot better for the game if there were just an easy mode for playing the game through rather than have game mechanics that people have to decide for themselves whether they're fair to use or not - an explicit normal or easy difficulty mode would solve this problem in a much better way.

Because people don't want to play games with a ton of artificial constraints - people want to play to the best of their ability, and when something is overpowered it forces them to either make a choice to just choose to intentionally make stupid ingame choices or to play the game in a cheesy way.. People want to play the game to the best of their ability, but they want the game to still be fun while they're playing the game at the best of their ability - and things that are overpowered in games almost always make those 2 goals conflict. For a lot of people (myself included) when you have to intentionally make stupid choices in game to keep it interesting the game just becomes dull - there's no sense of challenge anymore once you have to start handicapping yourself. The same question could be asked of so many things - why can't we start the game with legendaries? Why do the badge level requirements exist? You could just as easily argue that people could artifficiailly impose these rules on themselves (just don't pick the legendary and don't level past X level!), but there's no way to ever draw the line to say what is/isn't fair once you have to start using these kinds of artificial constraints, and it's half of the point of game developers to decide what should/shouldn't be in the game.