LogFAQs > #889695197

Types and abilities have become pretty complicated - well maybe not complicated per se but there's a lot of it. Different moves with different effects, moves, abilities. And the game uses in-game trainers to show them off.

Like a great deal of trainers aren't supposed to be a challenge, they're supposed to teach players about the effectiveness of certain moves or strategies. A trainer will use encore when it doesn't make much sense to do so, just to teach people how to do it. The casual kid who plays Pokemon maybe needs that.

I saw a kid playing it at work during lunch once using a fire move on a Starmie. And he wasn't even like, 5, he was 12 or something. But he made such a simple error and that showed me that for as much as we all know a lot about Pokemon, to a new player there is an awful lot to learn. For everyone on this board it's effortless but we aren't the target demographic.

I agree there should be a difficulty setting, but that's something I always bear in mind - and honestly, the lack of challenge has never bothered me, since I just like playing through Pokemon games. They're the Disney of videogames to me. Comforting and happy and not really challenging (and then in the postgame it can be).

I always felt this was a thing with mass effect too, but from a narrative POV more than a gameplay one. Like people say choices don't matter in ME but to me that's wrong - the problem is the people who care enough to have that sort of discussion and make that complaint are the kind of people that will have played extremely thoroughly and the way, say, ME3 was set up (especially after some patches) meant that a very thorough, hardcore player would have the best possible fleet at the end almost without a doubt, regardless of what happened before. But if you chose to skip shit and not do shit then suddenly the ME2 ending affects whether you can choose destroy or control. I understand the issue but equally I understand Bioware catering to casual players more.

Things like the Tali trial or solving the Quarian/Geth conflict are also examples of this. Thoroughness allowed you to find the perfect solution to those issues, more than your previous deductive skill. It wasn't so important that you thought long and hard about what you should choose so long as you chose to put yourself in the position to make that choice in the first place. In other words, the game encouraged you to play it as much as possible and rewarded you simply for doing that more than for choosing between two things.
Choices that really matter in ME are more player choices that come down to action vs. inaction than the big 50/50s.

Basically in both cases you have two very popular RPG series that hardcore fans get frustrated with because they cater to far wider demographics and as a result limit themselves somewhat. ME could have had more narratively complex impact to its choices but that might have been alienating (and time-consuming in development). Pokemon could be far more difficult but that might be alienating to kids.

I'm fine with it. I get both the complaints and the reason I think. But I'm not going to say that the option of a difficulty increase wouldn't be much appreciated.
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TLO has my dog for a month.