Pokemon Shield and Feeling Deflated

So I’ve been playing Pokemon Shield for a while now. I’ve finished the main story and become the champion already. But I am still picking the game up occasionally. Why? Mostly to try and fill my Pokedex. Even if it’s a futile effort. But there is something bothering me about Pokemon Shield, and it’s the difficulty.

The game is too easy.

In fact, it’s insanely easy. To the point that I didn’t lose a single battle in the entirety of the main story. Only a handful of characters were of any challenge to me. Heck, even Leon, with his Gigantamax Charizard, wasn’t that difficult to battle. And with type advantages written next to your attacks, you don’t have to rely on brainpower alone to know what is super effective or not.

There are many things that make Pokemon Sword and Shield easier. One of them being that there are loads of places to heal your Pokemon. Going after the Wooloo at the very start of the game had Hop healing your Pokemon after every battle. In the Galar Mines, there are people at each exit that will heal your Pokemon for you. And Hammerlocke has THREE Pokecenters. Throughout the more quest-y parts of the game, people will randomly heal your Pokemon too.

Items and money are also plentiful. I somehow managed to hit 1 million poke-dollars, and have more watts than I know what to do with. And because I’ve been doing the Dynamax raids, I am also swimming in various candies. So even leveling up Pokemon is much easier.

Speaking of Dynamax raids, those are pretty easy too. The challenge isn’t beating the boss in time, but rather praying that your NPC team mates don’t faint. There’s almost always one Pokemon that the raid boss deals super effective damage to, as well as one Pokemon that spams buffs, only for the boss to reset everyone’s stats. I find myself pleased to see Magikarps, because they at least properly attack with Hydropump.

I was just playing on default settings

Turns out, part of how easy the game is comes from the default settings. There aren’t many options in the settings, but the big one is “Battle Style”, which has two options. Selecting Set keeps your Pokemon in place if your opponent faints, while Switch lets you swap Pokemon. Of course, Switch is way easier, and it’s also the default. Other default settings though don’t do anything like that. They’re mostly cosmetic or helpful. Or they want to speed the game up slightly. None of them affect combat as much as the Battle Style setting. And I find that really weird.

However, even if I turn the setting off, the game still feels easier. Because plenty of other things also contributed to how easy the game is.

I still had fun though.

It’s a Pokemon game. So of course I’d derive some fun out of it. There was little challenge involved, but sometimes I want  to just mindlessly wander around and catch Pokemon.

And sometimes, I do just want to play something fun and simple. Still, discovering how easy Pokemon Shield is has kinda soured me. I thought that I was naturally good at Pokemon games. I was pleased with how smoothly I progressed. But no, it just turns out that Pokemon Shield is really, really easy…