#is this how the game is countering the ridiculous luck of getting an epic sword and shield before even getting the artisan station

[markdatter]

can you tell me what's wrong with this picture

[elyvorg]

I just beat Leon in Pokémon Shield despite my team being more than ten levels lower than his. I didn't use any (non-hold) items, either - the only advantage I allowed myself was playing with Shift on (although looking back on how the battle went, I might have been able to barely manage without it). I'm saying this not to boast about my epic Pokémon skillz, but to talk about how it felt awesome to manage to do that by using strategy. The reason I was so underlevelled is that my style of playing Pokémon games for the past few gens has been to train literally every Pokémon I'm interested in using, regardless of the fact that this gives me a team of way more than six. Because of this, I had so many different options for my strategy for the battle.

I did one test run first in which I knew I wasn't going to win the moment I saw his Pokémon's levels but then decided to flail around while spamming Max Revives just to see as much of his team as possible and scout out their moves, which managed to show me all his Pokémon except the Charizard I already knew about. Then I was planning to go and grind maybe five more levels on everyone to not be quite as ridiculously outmatched... except I couldn't stop thinking, what if it was already possible at this level? My Pokémon had pulled off some impressive KOs or near-KOs or tanking of big hits during the test battle, just enough to make me think I could just maybe do it if I put together the right strategy. I looked through my almost-a-box-full of options for Pokémon I'd been training to this level and carefully picked those that would be able to counter each of Leon's despite the level gap, maybe teaching them a couple of new moves and using some held items chosen specifically for the situation. This involved some nerding out checking each of his Pokémon's base stats to get a sense of roughly how strong they'd be and therefore how strong my Pokémon's relevant stats would need to be to tank a hit/outspeed/OHKO them.

Even then, it still took two attempts. The first time, things went mostly as I'd calculated, though I overestimated my Pokémon's capabilities just a little bit in some regards but managed to get through with some luck and some improvising, enough to get to his Charizard. And then... yeah, okay, I definitely underestimated his Charizard, and it destroyed the remainder of my team. (Tip: don't use a Drednaw; it has a Grass move. I thought it probably would, but it was worth a try on the off-chance it didn't, since Charizard was the one Pokémon whose moves I hadn’t managed to scout at all.) A bit more re-strategising was necessary for the next attempt with this in mind, the bottom line of which is that I still kind of hate the way Stealth Rock single-handedly makes a Pokémon's competitive worth hinge on its weakness to Rock and yet I sure took advantage of it here, but the more important bottom line is that Boltund is a very, very good dog. Even then, I still underestimated Charizard and spent the last few turns of the battle desperately improvising while not knowing if I would win. Putting together a strategy that I was pretty sure would work and watching it pay off felt awesome, but it also felt awesome to be frantically unsure whether my Pokémon could pull through in the end or not and then having them manage to do so!

(...I also partly won because Leon made some poor decisions while using Charizard. I guess I can headcanon that as being down to him also panicking because a challenger had never come this close to defeating him before. Throughout the whole game I was worried he wasn't going to live up to the constant hype of being supposedly unbeatable and would be anticlimactically easy to defeat, but nope, he lived up to it and then some.)

If you've been finding Pokémon games too easy lately, I highly recommend my playstyle! Don't just restrict yourself to a team of six; use any and all of the Pokémon you find cool or interesting! This is less of a hassle than it's ever been now thanks to the ability to access your PC boxes from anywhere (THANK YOU for this, Game Freak). Your team will be underlevelled, but you'll have so many options to pick from to try and strategise your way through a tough battle without just level grinding through the problem! Pokémon is such a fun strategy game when strategy is actually properly necessary, which doesn't only have to be in competetive PvP situations.

Honestly I kind of wish I'd had more battles in this game in which I'd needed to pull out all the stops and use such careful strategising to win. For most of the game I wasn't that underlevelled thanks to the the Exp Share-like function that can't be turned off in this game even though I'd usually do that, and the unusually high-levelled wild Pokémon you can easily grind against (making me frequently overestimate what levels the Gym Leaders would be). So there were only a tiny handful of other battles that also gave the same rush as this one due to me winning through strategy rather than simply using decently-levelled Pokémon with type advantages.

But still! I love and am so proud of my team who won me the battle, and all of their friends in the box who didn't happen to be suited for this particular battle but still helped get me through other important battles, and I couldn't have done it without any of them. I just love Pokémon, guys. The even better thing about this playstyle is that it means you get to use every Pokémon you want to use, with no "oh that one'd be cool but I've already got six/already got one of that type so I can't", and each of them is bound to get at least one battle in which they can shine and show how awesome they are. MOAR POKÉMON FRIENDS.

Sword and Shield aren't perfect games, but I'm never going to mention my gripes with them (it's not Dexit, though; I literally do not care about Dexit), because ultimately they didn't stop me from just having so much fun playing through this game and exploring Galar and discovering new Pokémon and making them my partners. POKÉMON.