I loved the Gen 2 games for a lot of reasons, but my big issue with them was always the level scaling. It never made any sense to me that you could play through Johto and Kanto both and even after beating every trainer in the game your team would still be ten levels lower than they were at the end of the Gen I games. I don't know if it was GF's intent, but I always thought of Whitney as a way to help you compensate for that. There's no way to have your whole team of 3 or 4 Pokemon at that Miltank's level or higher by the time you get to her if you just do trainer battles, so you end up grinding in the tall grass until you're strong enough to be sure of a victory, and that sets the stage for doing more of that later on in the game.
As far as tougher bosses, Nihlathak in Diablo 2 was a pain in the ass on almost every difficulty, especially for first-timers who didn't know what they were getting into.
Johto was intentionally designed with a "pick your own path" system after, I think, Badge 3. So the level curve was made so that any of the three available paths would be at your level. Which meant that like half the region wasn't available for being part of the level curve because of redundancy.
Kanto was similar in that you could technically do Badges 4-6 in roughly any order and the level curve was only slightly prohibitive to doing so. But it wasn't nearly to the level Johto was. And it didn't have a fucking final boss in the 80s with a super strong team, so you could just finish Red/Blue with a team leveled pretty normally into the high 50s and be happy.
Its how you can tell that the legions of people who claim HeartGold/SoulSilver are the best/favorite games play them exclusively on emulator or with traded from elsewhere Pokemon. Because playing them actually like they were designed is literal misery no matter what other good they bring.
And I played the original on Gameboy, where it had the excuse of being super primitive as to why its filled with bad decisions and design, instead of a full price remake that spent its time adding half a dozen gimmicks instead of fixing one of the biggest issues with the game.
I loved the Gen 2 games for a lot of reasons, but my big issue with them was always the level scaling. It never made any sense to me that you could play through Johto and Kanto both and even after beating every trainer in the game your team would still be ten levels lower than they were at the end of the Gen I games. I don't know if it was GF's intent, but I always thought of Whitney as a way to help you compensate for that. There's no way to have your whole team of 3 or 4 Pokemon at that Miltank's level or higher by the time you get to her if you just do trainer battles, so you end up grinding in the tall grass until you're strong enough to be sure of a victory, and that sets the stage for doing more of that later on in the game.
As far as tougher bosses, Nihlathak in Diablo 2 was a pain in the ass on almost every difficulty, especially for first-timers who didn't know what they were getting into.
Johto was intentionally designed with a "pick your own path" system after, I think, Badge 3. So the level curve was made so that any of the three available paths would be at your level. Which meant that like half the region wasn't available for being part of the level curve because of redundancy.
Kanto was similar in that you could technically do Badges 4-6 in roughly any order and the level curve was only slightly prohibitive to doing so. But it wasn't nearly to the level Johto was. And it didn't have a fucking final boss in the 80s with a super strong team, so you could just finish Red/Blue with a team leveled pretty normally into the high 50s and be happy.
Its how you can tell that the legions of people who claim HeartGold/SoulSilver are the best/favorite games play them exclusively on emulator or with traded from elsewhere Pokemon. Because playing them actually like they were designed is literal misery no matter what other good they bring.
I played them originally on DS. I loved them. The Pokewalker was neat. Sit and spin.
And I played the original on Gameboy, where it had the excuse of being super primitive as to why its filled with bad decisions and design, instead of a full price remake that spent its time adding half a dozen gimmicks instead of fixing one of the biggest issues with the game.
The frustration when the mount finally drops and it just somehow happens to go to the guild leader's wife despite the roll.