10 Problems With Pokémon Gold & Silver Nobody Wants To Admit
7. Underlevelling Was A Problem
Every game needs a strong difficulty curve so players get to feel a real sense of progression as they play through dozens of hours of random and frustrating encounters. Pokémon has always liked to easily represent that struggle through the level of its eponymous creatures. The problem here is not that Champion Lance's ace monster was only level 50 (and totally hacked, because Dragonair only evolves in to Dragonite at level 55, LANCE HAS BEEN DOPING). The problem is the drastically wide gulf that emerges out of nowhere between the player's Pokémon and those in the wild, as well as some trainers, especially in Kanto (no I'm not done ragging on that). That's without mentioning going from Blue's team capping at 60 to Red's at 81. How much grinding was expected of us in that leisurely jaunt from Viridian City to Mt Silver?
To put this in to some real tangible numbers for you, think of the seventh gym leader Pryce; his strongest Pokémon was level 31, his weakest level 27. Between him and the next gym leader Claire you have a route where the strongest trainers' each only have one Pokémon at level 27, and wild Pokémon don't go above 25 at best. Claire's team then ranges between 37 to 40. That's a lot of numbers I'm throwing at your face right now, but you need to understand the ludicrously stupid level design staring you in the face.
The necessity of grinding became one of the two resultant problems of this underlevelling nonsense. Your experience yield would be too low coming off a route and you’d have to find opponents to keep you up to snuff. The other problem is god forbid you try to catch any Pokémon for your team late game when they’re 20 levels down from where they need to be. This led to a lot of critters going unused by players who did not have the time for that. Speaking of which...