Highlights

  • Gen 9 Pokemon Scarlet and Violet lacked level scaling, resulting in overall easy gameplay and battles that never felt challenging.
  • The Indigo Disk DLC aims to provide a major challenge, introducing double battles with competitive strategies and high-level teams.
  • The BB League in The Indigo Disk is expected to be the toughest challenge yet, featuring high-level Pokemon and potentially a 7-headed Dipplin evolution. Players should be prepared for a surprise and a run for their money.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have a lot of great qualities that will mark Gen 9 as one of the most impactful in the mainline series for a long time to come, but unfortunately, they also came with some issues that felt out of place for such revolutionary and well-written games. Alongside various technical and performance issues that had a detrimental effect on some players' experience overall, one of the most notable problems with Gen 9 games was the lack of level scaling. With an open-world game the size of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's Paldea region, level scaling would have been a fantastic addition - and it seems that The Indigo Disk will finally give players a challenge, and a tough one while at it.

Pokemon games' difficulty has often been a hot topic within the community due to how easy some titles can feel compared to others, with games like Pokemon Let's Go Eevee and Pikachu being at one end of the spectrum and titles like Pokemon Legends: Arceus at the other. Gen 9 wasn't particularly challenging in any of its storylines or pieces of content, with epic battles against Titan Pokemon, the Elite Four, Champion Geeta, or even Nemona almost never feeling vaguely threatening. Level scaling is the reason why, and The Indigo Disk DLC's approach seems like a different story.

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Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's Difficulty is About to Go Up

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's The Indigo Disk Takes Competitive Battles to the Next Level

Based on The Indigo Disk previews, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's difficulty might be changing drastically. While this won't really have any effects on the base game, and with The Teal Mask already attempting something similar with harder battles against the Kitakami Ogre Club, The Indigo Disk seems to be set on providing players with a major challenge. Even though mainline games rarely feature double battles all that much, that is the dominant Pokemon VGC format, and it seems that the second DLC will make it its own as well.

Previously hinted at by renowned Pokemon leaker Riddler Khu, the previews for The Indigo Disk confirm that the DLC will indeed have multiple double battles in it, and many of them will have a competitive-adjacent format.

There will be trainers using popular and effective double battle strategies, focusing on one or two key victory conditions, using competitively-viable items and Pokemon, and more. The epitome of this will be Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's BB League battles, as these new trainers will seemingly have a combination of all the best Pokemon and strategies for double battles, and a high-level team to boot.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's BB League Might be The Toughest Challenge Yet

The previews had two different saves, with the first being tied to exploration and featuring a team of level 80 Pokemon, and the second being tied to a battle against Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's Amarys in The Indigo Disk, which instead used level 88 Pokemon with competitive movesets and items. This alone shows what the gap truly is for The Pokemon Company to go ahead and provide players with stronger Pokemon just to face against one BB League member - and there are four of them.

These are unprecedented levels of difficulty in Pokemon games, possibly only comparable to Pokemon Legends: Arceus ' Volo boss battle with Giratina appearing as a seventh Pokemon - and then having a second form.

On top of that, the BB League's Champion is likely to pack even more of a punch in battle, and if the leaks are correct, then players might face a team of six and then a 7-headed Dipplin evolution in The Indigo Disk's biggest battle, where each head allegedly makes for a single Pokemon fight. As such, fans hoping to stroll through The Indigo Disk might be in for a surprise and instead get a run for their money.