"(Spoilers) I think the climactic story battle illustrates one of the important challenges in making Pokemon games difficult."

More difficulty is one of the popularly requested features in newer games, and USUM are receiving some praise for doing just that. However, I think the climactic battle against Ultra Necrozma also illustrates some of the series' mechanical limitations that make implementing difficulty more challenging than people realise.So the developers decided to throw you up against a boss Pokemon with a 754 base stat total, including insane Speed and both attacking stats. It also has a 100 BP, 100% accuracy move that ignores abilities.And what happens? It just oneshots everything. That's point number one: Pokemon HP values aren't built for drawn-out fights. Even legendaries just have a normal health bar. Look at competitive Pokemon, and notice how it's all about OHKOs and 2HKOs - the mechanics of the game just have serious difficulty supporting anything other than nuclear rocket tag.What happens next? You switch in another Pokemon.... it gets oneshotted. Repeat, repeat, suddenly you're done for. The 1v1 nature of Pokemon battles means it's easy to get locked down - if something can one-hit everything in your party, you can't do much more than cycle Revives. Other JRPGs tend to give you full-party combat, in which one knockout can still be revived while the others deal with the boss.And how do players deal with this? Overlevelling? But that's just grinding, which isn't a great way to make the difficulty more enjoyable. Some people propose specific cheese strategies, like Zoroark or FEAR, or suggest using specific Pokemon to tank one hit and use Toxic, then cycle with Revives. It's cool that some clever strategy is rewarded, but in a game with a heavy emphasis on personalised party-building, it kind of detracts from the overall allure of the game.I'm not saying it was a bad fight - I actually had a lot of fun. I just found it enlightening as to why some aspects of Pokemon's mechanics make difficulty a taller order than we might initially think. via /r/pokemon http://ift.tt/2iPYv7J