[Very harsh critique for Intense mode (13.02, Set/No Items) [Spoilers]]

On 8/5/2021 at 11:52 AM, Moto said:

 

I'm not going to act like this completely delegitimizes your complaints, but if mono psychic can beat Geara, then I really think you do not need crazy specific counters for every mon. You can still use mons that you want, you just have to really look into the options available for each one. Is ch15 intense quite difficult? Yes, but just stating that over and over again in different ways doesn't mean it is unfair. 

 

While that is indeed a Psychic monotype team, it's also equally clearly a specifically designed counterteam.  So yes, "crazy specific counters" are indeed required on Intense mode, at least for the more challenging fights.  From a game design perspective, this changes the framework of any given battle from in-the-moment adaptation with your immediate into a resource gathering exercise.  Instead of thinking, "how can my current team beat this?", Intense mode encourages you to instead wonder, "what encounters are available to me that could help me overcome this hurdle?", because in many cases, any random, static team of 6 mons will often have literally 0 potential routes to victory against some of the game's tougher bosses.  The team I used to beat Amber couldn't possibly beat the whale, no matter the movesets or EV spreads.  

 

From a purely conceptual standpoint, I don't have a problem with this at all.  It challenges not only a player's broader knowledge of the game - learnsets, Pokemon availability, breeding - but also their ability to identify what key elements are required to search for such that the new pokemon will provide a significant improvement in their winning chances.  However, the execution of the player's solution will basically always look something like this: 1.) think of solution Pokemon, 2.) find/catch it, 3.) breed it, and 4.) EV train it appropriately, probably with the help of a damage calculator. 

 

The fundamental issue with Rejuvenation's design is simply this: those four steps take EGREGIOUS amounts of time.  Speeding up the game by a couple times barely mitigates this, since when you need to optimize an entire team for a single fight, and then do that for 50 fights over the course of a playthrough, that's potentially upwards of 300 Pokemon you're developing from scratch.  Realistically it's much less, of course, since you'd expect a decent Pokemon to serve you multiple times over a run, but I nonetheless filled over an entire box of mons over the course of my playthrough - a process that would have wasted hundreds of my real-life hours to achieve, and something Pokemon Showdown would enable me to do in mere minutes.  

 

From a development standpoint, the solution to this problem is relatively simple: make EV/IV training accessible, make it available from the very beginning of the game, and make it so that I don't have to waste my time on something that would be trivial for me to achieve if I had both an elementary knowledge of game mechanics and the time to waste on them.  The systems employed in the main line games for EV and IV moderation (repeated battling and breeding, respectively) neither work nor make sense in the context of a challenge like Rejuvenation V13's Intense mode.  In fact, I think Intense is best enjoyed when you simply use Debug mode for exactly that: instantly modifying your mons in a way that doesn't change what you can fundamentally do, but cuts hours of work into seconds.

 

No one capable of beating even the regular difficulty is ignorant of EV mechanics.  Forcing people to battle hundreds of wild mons, dozens of times over the course of a playthrough, is unnecessary and ridiculous.  An in-game menu should be implemented such to allow Intense mode players to instantly modify IVs, EVs, and nature, and it should be available from the very beginning of the game.  The decision to shift the EV training rooms (which while better than nothing, are still unreasonably slow) even further back in the game, speaks to me of the dev's complete lack of respect for their player's time - or at least, it's strange for them to insist on such archaic main line game mechanics when it inconveniences the player, while at the same time being perfectly willing to give Ryden's Nidoqueen 1500 EVs.  I can almost feel the spit on my face.

 

Basically, I would encourage everyone to play Intense mode with the debug menu.  It doesn't lower the actual difficulty (unless you're giving yourself Arceus or something, which is entirely removed from the context I'm discussing), and you'll have more life to live for it.  

[Question about Debug]

I've always seen it as evening the playing field.  After all, having perfect IVs on both sides is a form of parity, and already represents a substantial increase in difficulty from the main line games, where most trainers have IVs of 0 across the board.

 

Besides, even if you don't cheat, on Intense mode, the AI definitely will.  It won't be the 31 IVs on every opponent's Pokemon that does you in, it'll be the 252 EVs in every stat starting around chapter 11-12.  Also, I don't recommend Intense for V13; the difficultly is egregious and also mostly artificial (see: 252 EVs in every stat).  This coming from a guy who completed a hardcore nuzlocke of Reborn up to current episode, so I can't be too terrible at the game.  

[Chase Me Pokemon Events]

I thought that Rock Climb wasn't yet functional... Was there an update that I can't find reference to?

EDIT: nvm