Necrikus

Well, it's nice to know I'm not the only one surprised by the difficulty, though I am a bit disheartened how far into the game I see people complaining about. I had played version 12 of Rejuvenation some time back. But in it, I recall playing on normal before getting stuck on Terajuma for some reason. I took a long break until recently when I downloaded V13... and I couldn't beat Geara in chapter 3. I just kept banging my head trying to figure out a way to handle Giratina and the double battle with Geara with the same team until I forced myself to try a new game on casual mode instead of normal. On casual I was easily able to finish chapter 3, rarely needing to retry battles against even the toughest fights. It really lives up to the "casual" name that difficulty has; so much so that it feels like I've robbed myself of a lot of the fun. During my short time trying to do my run on normal mode (no mods/debug mode), I kept having a feeling that the game just does not give me the tools to handle the harder fights. It's as though the game is so restrictive on what available pokemon, items, and services one has access to during any of the chapter's I've seen so far that it's impossible to progress with just a strong team and a good understanding of the game's mechanics. Far too often, I straight up had to drastically change my team to have a chance at winning a battle, and even then luck had to be on my side. And it really isn't fun to catch/train pokemon I would normally not want to use if I didn't feel like I was being forced to do so. And forget about IVs and EVs, without debug mode I just do not hate myself enough to optimise in that sort of way just so I can get through the earliest of the early game. It also feels as though the "bosses" of the game are a little too optimized, not just having field advantages that the player often can do little about in the early game where the tools available to you are the most restrictive, but also having teams that have so much type coverage that I often find the pokemon I bring in specifically for the fight being one or two shotted by a move the opponent doesn't even have STAB with. Also, I feel like the computer cheats sometimes; like, knowing when I'm going to use an item or certain moves and acting accordingly. I cannot prove it, but it definitely feels that way. Which just makes it feel more like I won because of luck instead of my tactics or strategy. I really, really hope there can be a healthy middle-ground between the game's casual and normal settings.