people do care about difficulty now a days and people do care about the most recent games being quite easy alot, people have been asking for difficulty options for awhile now and are still not getting them
also about the pokemon being locked behind the postgame, it's a problem for GSC cause most of the new pokemon introduced in Gen 2 are locked behind it. Next time you play a game set in Johto try beating the game only using a team of Gen 2 pokemon cause wither you end up with a team of nothing but the most basic pokemon or you just can't do it
Yes, and I should expand on this: it's not just about them being in the postgame, which is annoying enough, but understandable. Like, pseudo-legendaries are often found very late and so say stuff like Larvitar being very late in areas like Mt. Silver isn't too unusual. It's also not just about how it's not just the pseudos but also random stuff like Houndour that gets locked behind the postgame as well which is more annoying.
But on top this, the really annoying thing about this is the level balance there as well, or rather, the lack of it. By the time you get to Kanto, your team should be in the very high 40s, low level 50s, at least. And that's where the Kanto gym leaders' Pokémon are as well.
But what level are the new wild Pokémon? Like, in Route 7, outside Celadon, that Houndour I mentioned?
Level 15. Why 15? Why not say low Level 40s, maybe like 5 levels lower than the nearby Gym Leaders or so to match how they were bumped up and the point of the game you're actually in; why the need to keep the wild Pokémon levels pseudo-consistent with what they were in Gen 1, but not the Gym Leaders or trainers in Kanto themselves or anything under the same logic? Who knows? The Gym Leaders' levels were bumped up because of the level curve, so why wasn't the level of the wild Pokémon, so you can use them if you want? And speaking of which, checking on Serebii real quick, Level 15 is lower level than anything can be found on that Route in Red/Blue and only matches the Abra that was found on the Route in Yellow, so the levels of the wild encounters on the Route actively got lower compared to Gen 1, despite the trainers levels and everything going up.
It's bizarre, and pretty much puts a stop to you using those Pokémon for absolutely no good reason at all, since they're so far, far, below the level of anything else for no discernible reason. If they were at least a decent level, you could do something with them, but at those levels? Unless you grind, grind, grind, they're put out of any consideration for even the last few games for no good reason at all, and that's what really sets me off about how GSC handles Pokémon distribution: that extra little insult-to-injury when you note the levels things are at, which is just completely all over the place, random, and makes no sense at all.
Again, it would be one thing if we were talking about pseudo-legendaries, gift Pokémon, Pokémon you specifically have to hatch from an egg/baby Pokémon, and stuff like that, but we're talking about non-pseudos and stuff that's flat-out found in the wild, that are still at random levels anyway. That's just bad design that I can find no reason for, it just doesn't make sense to me at all.
EDIT: I should clarify, this in particular is a bit of a personal subject for me because as a kid, prior to Gold/Silver coming out, I thought Houndour/Houndoom were really cool Pokémon and was looking forward to having them on my team. So when I actually got the games themselves and started looking for it, only to find out that they were shoved all the way next to Celadon City for some reason, and they were such a low, unreasonable level on top of that... I was naturally kind of annoyed, to put it mildly, and just couldn't understand why they would make it so hard to use such a cool Pokémon, and just shove it into a corner like that. One of my biggest disappointments with G/S was how they handled stuff like that for sure and just how disjointed that stuff was.
