Ok, not gonna lie, it takes a lot of BS for me to complain about a game, especially here, but this game's insistence on being 'hard' has made me soft as fuck.
The first few battles have you up against level 15 or 14 pokemon with little counters to them available in the route. So you kinda NEED to grind, which is always a bad sign in game design. But god forbid you walk to the breeder meant for grinding, who gives the same amount of exp per pokemon as the normal trainers, because that means "you need a crutch".
Difficulty =/ time wasted. High difficulty should mean that the fights are stressful, but possible without needing to pray on double team, no crits, and a busted starter who learns a fairy type 'sonicboom' move who still, with leftovers, gets bodied by level 15 STAGE TWO EVOLUTIONS on route one. Feels like this was made by the 'Dark Souls gameplay should only be big swords with no spells or summons' kinda guy.
I was very interested. Then I was annoyed but persistent. Now I'm just done. 2/10