I’ll be using gen 4 and below as older since that’s what I’m used to,
I have Platinum and Emerald and I’ve been wanting to play through them to get to the end game to play the battle tower or equivalent since their online servers are shut down (or non existent with the GBA)
I guess I’m just looking for tips and a discussion as to how everyone plays their Pokémon game. I find that whenever I play through any Pokémon game, with the exp. share shared or not, I always over level one Pokémon. Not too much, at least not as bad as when I was a kid, but in my emerald game it got to the point where I had a grovyle in the second gym and my other three Pokémon were level 10 below. How do you maintain a balance? Again, I’m not a new player, I’ve been playing Pokémon for almost all my life and I’m 24, however I’ve always been bad at party management type games and I’ve been wanting your opinions/discussions on this topic.
I have a slightly weird and a bit too complicated approach to this issue, but it works for me at least:
I’m an avid breeder and have been maintaining a huge collection of 'mons with special egg moves, good IVs (and later Apriballs and hidden abilities) since the breeding mechanic was introduced. Whenever I feel the urge to restart a run on any game, including the “older” ones, I create five eggs for a starter team and let them hatch in the new playthrough. That way I make sure that every team member is useful to me right from the start and I have no issues circling through them depending on which one is the most useful for the climate/zone I’m currently in or which one needs a little more XP at the moment.
Whenever I rely only on the 'mons that can be caught in early routes, I end up overlevelling my starter as they tend to be the most (or only…) useful team member and trying to battle with the others feels like a chore. It’s just not fun to try and fight with a Poochyena that only knows Tackle, Howl, Sand Attack and Growl until it finally gained eight or so more levels to learn its first actually useful attack, and then having to swap it out shortly after that because you need to drag an HM slave with you. =/
The downside is that you either need someone else to help you trade, or use one of the still availiable online storage options to trade with yourself in order to move the eggs or newly hatched 'mons into another game, and Nintendo’s service in that sector isn’t exactly convenient.
See, once I was introduced to breeding in Pokémon, that’s all I’ve been wanting to do. Not necessarily make the perfect mons, but just breed until I have the nature I want and then go from there.
I’ve been doing research and the best game, well “best” game on the 3DS era that I can see when it comes to breeding and the battle (whatever it’s called) is USUM, but I like the difficulty of the gen 4 and below games.