"Can we just talk about how 'anti-levelling' Sun and Moon is?"

In nearly every game since around possibly Gen 4, there's been a quick way to level up Pokémon in nearly every region.Gen 5 was the first generation to give the player a free Lucky Egg per save file during the story mode, and there was also a character in the postgame who had a small chance of giving you extra Lucky Eggs randomly once per day, as well as two stadiums, which had battleable trainers with Level 50-65 Pokémon, each sports themed trainer would switch out every few hours with other sports themed trainers, giving the player a chance to gain levels fast, which was helpful given Gen 5's levelling mechanics. There was also a daily Cheren battle, which also helped.Gen 6 introduced the restraunts, which allowed players to grind against Level 60 Pokémon, and given Amie's EXP buff and the EXP Share and a free Lucky Egg from Coumarine, levelling from Level 1 to 100 could literally take around 45 minutes. Chansey safaris also helped getting Lucky Eggs, as it was by far the easiest way of farming Lucky Eggs, until ORAS.ORAS added secret bases, and of course, given that you still gained experience in them and the ability to set any Pokémon and any level you liked made it easy to set up quick EXP farms with them, and Blissey bases were the most common form of secret base as a result. ORAS also allowed Pelippers to hold Lucky Eggs if encountered via dexnav, and given how numerous they are, they made them very easy to obtain.However, Gen 7 seems to avert levelling quickly in every way possible. First of all, the game returned to the Gen 5 levelling mechanics, which made EXP gain change depending on you and your opponent's levels. While this doesn't really hinder too much, it's what else they did that makes levelling in Sun and Moon so long and tedious.Normally, for those who just wanted to breed Pokémon, the daycare was actually a valid place to level grind Pokémon, albeit somewhat risky. In Sun and Moon, the daycare doesn't raise levels whatsoever, and that's a job for Isle Evelup in Poké Pelago, which, although it allows you to train 18 Pokémon at a time, which is way more than the daycare used to, unlike the daycare, which was step count based, it's time based, meaning that it sometimes will take literal hours for Pokémon to level up. There's still Festival Plaza, which, although you can gain a lot of levels through it, takes time to set up and is essentially a once a day thing (Depending on how many facilities set up you have). There's a cafe in Hau'oli City that allows for repeatable battles as long as you have enough money, yet they don't give a large amount of EXP, as each trainer only has one Pokémon.Another big change was to Lucky Eggs. Unlike Gen 5 and 6, there's no physically possible way to get multiple Lucky Eggs in the game without trading. Pelippers no longer have it and most concerningly, after six generations it's been removed from Chansey's wild hold items all together.This only really leaves the Elite Four. Now to me, it seems like the Elite Four was purposefully designed to be anti-levelling. What do I mean by this? Well, ket's look at it this way:Unlike earlier gens, every member of the Elite Four has two full restores, which wouldn't be too much of a problem if it wasn't for:There's three Pokémon with Sturdy. Combined with the above mentioned full restores, there's a high chance you could waste PP quickly, and unless you invested in Leppa farming, this could be quite annoyingTwo of the Elite Four members start off with a Pokémon with Fake Out, which could potentially knock out the Pokémon you were training if you weren't carefulThe challengers at the champion title defense battle are random each timeThree of these said challengers have a Magnezone, which has Sturdy, causing the above mentioned Sturdy + full restore situation to yet again ariseAnd while these are issues that physically affect grinding, there's a few other issues with the Elite Four for grinding:The Pokémon centre, unlike in previous games, is a distance away from the leagueThe two guys, who, despite knowing you as the champion, still question everything you do in front of the doorEach Elite four has a short 'cutscene' of sorts before you approach themWhich, simply put, combined together, these three points make Elite Four grinding much longer than it really should beIt seems really odd giving how much Game Freak seems to be adding in to aid newcomers into joining the competitive side of the game, such as Hyper Training, which requires Level 100, that Game Freak would make this one of the hardest games to grind in, aside from Gen I.Does anybody else find this interesting? via /r/pokemon http://ift.tt/2jIDZof