This year, Pokémon is celebrating its 25th Anniversary. The series remains focused on children as its primary audience, yet many of the 10-year-olds who bought Red and Blue are now in their 20s and 30s, and they're still eagerly purchasing Pokémon games. The ability to hold such a wide age demographic is part of what makes Pokémon so special, but if the franchise continues to favor new, young fans over long-standing adult and teen players, the games risk isolating the latter over time. The shift promised by Pokémon Legends: Arceus is an excellent move on this front, but there's another, simpler move Game Freak could make to entertain longtime fans: add a Hard Mode.
Pokémon is, at its heart, a strategy game. Players train their Pokémon, sculpt a team whose types best address the battles at hand, and stock up on items in case of emergency. But more recent generations have made the game so easy to pull off, strategy is barely necessary - and large swaths of the Pokémon's community have noticed. Enough fans found the most recent entries so easy, they sought to engineer their own Sword and Shield hard mode by creating scarcity.
Perhaps the biggest nerf is that players no longer need to find a PC to change the Pokémon in their party. In recent games, if a Pokémon team becomes fatigued, they can simply be switched out for those in the player's box - even in the middle of a gym or a route. Conceding to the existence of modern-day smart phones makes sense, but the ready availability they provide in Pokémon gameplay removes any feeling of scarcity or threat. Other tweaks that have made the game easier is the discontinuation of HMs which block paths; an over-abundance of ways to level up Pokémon, including plentiful Rare Candies, jobs, and generous Experience Shares; and routes which are easy to navigate.
What Could a Pokémon Hard Mode Look Like?
A significant chunk of Pokémon's fanbase is in their 20s and 30s. Spurred by the popularity of Pokémon GO and the Switch itself, many of the series' early fanbases are back on the ride. A clever Reddit thread by user hororo points toward multiple sources of convincing evidence that most of Pokémon's fanbase is actually 18 or older. But Game Freak and the Pokémon Company appear to be keeping the games easy on purpose, because they are prioritizing keeping their younger and more casual fanbases engaged. Other Nintendo franchises have recognized that the answer to this conundrum is to offer fans the option to choose or earn varying difficulties. For example, most Legend of Zelda games allow the player to replay the game on increased difficulty after completion.
A Hard Mode doesn't have to mean an entirely new game with a Pokémon meets Dark Souls-level difficulty boasted on the box. Simply going back to the old PC system, where players could only change out their party in Poké Centers, would make the game much harder. Another possibility could be upping the level of other trainers' Pokémon, or throwing a surprise Ground-type among a rival trainer's Water-type team to halt Jolteon in its tracks. A Hard Mode with gyms not defined by type, but instead entirely consisting of balanced teams, would be thrilling as well.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus's 2022 release could be anticipating some of these issues. At the very least, people definitely didn't have smart phones or PCs in ancient Sinnoh. It will also be interesting to see if Arceus' open world undoes the hand-holding nature of recent games' straightforward routes. With Arceus, Pokémon has its first-ever opportunity to truly reinvent what a Pokémon game is.
Source: Reddit