""Hard Mode" has been one of the most popular suggestions. But HOW would you suggest increasing the difficulty of a game?"

Fans have repeatedly requested for a harder difficulty, but often fail to provide constructive suggestions on making a game harder.While raising an NPC's trainer level is an intuitive suggestion, this is a lazy method that can be easily beaten through grinding. Plus, in the rom hacking community, this form of artificial difficulty is just bad design...What are your suggestions on making a Pokemon game harder on a realistic level? This means something implementable from Nintendo's perspective; I doubt that GameFreak would ever officially support a Nuzlocke mode - imagine all the bad vibes and salt younger players would get if they permanently lost their box legendary or even worse, entire save file.This also means that something like "just give every trainer 6 mon, duh" would be unrealistic as I doubt GameFreak would want their games to be tediously long.My own ideas are:Design NPC encounters that are meant to be encountered as a "team". For instance, the "Nugget Bridge" in FRLG could have a series of NPCs that each use a mono-type team to test if you have been overly-reliant on your starter. If you are overly-reliant on your Charmander, than perhaps you would struggle against the NPC with a mono-Water.Alternatively, individual NPCs could have a team that has a clear goal. Maybe they start off with a lead mon with Prankster that spams Thunder Wave - something seemingly innocent, right? But their next mon could perhaps be carrying Smelling Salts as a move to capitalize on the inflicted status. Other themes could be i.e. a Intimidate team meant to punish physical attackers, or a specially-defensive team.In the post-game, a NG+ mode could be temporarily implemented in certain encounters, All mons (including yours) could be scaled to lvl 50, and the Battle Tower AI could be implemented. This would shine in something like SwSh's post-game tournament mode; since all the mons are scaled to lvl 50, you are essentially relying on your EV training and movesets to carry.What are your suggestions? via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/ZHbSm3f