You say this as if the trainer who has a level 60 Ho-oh is somehow as big and muscular as a Machamp, when they're probably still just as physically weak as they were the day they started their journey. Once more, the trainer is the one being attacked, not the Pokémon, so determining how weak a Pokémon is based on the trainer's lead Pokémon is silly.
No, I'm saying it as if this is HG/SS, where your lead Pokémon is walking directly behind you and would be clearly visible to the Pokémon attacking you. Most Pokémon seem to have a pretty decent intelligence, and heck, even an antelope would be smart enough to know not to attack a human who's got a lion following right behind them. The antelope wouldn't say "Well, it'll be okay; I'm just attacking the human, not the lion, so I won't be in any danger." The antelope would say "Holy crap, if I attack that human, I will be less than five feet away from a lion."
Clearly it is the way Pokémon games are made, given that the series has been running fifteen years and has worked that way the entire time.
And what, now you
like the way things have been done for the last fifteen years? Your whole conceit in this topic was that the way the games have been made for the last fifteen years sucks and requires major changes. Your very first point was that they're too slow. Then someone else comes up with an idea that would actually speed things up, and suddenly the way the games have been made for the last fifteen years is sacrosanct?
Or are you just trying to win some territory in the argument by factually disproving one of my points, regardless of how it affects your overall argument? Because the main series games aren't made by Nintendo. Game Freak is a second party (and they were apparently a third party as recently as 1999).
And to actually address the point, that's
not the way the games have been made. They
don't sacrifice gameplay for narrative. If they did, you could never use a Magcargo, because your character and everything around them would burst into flames from being within a few feet of something that's several times hotter than the surface of the sun. You couldn't send a fish into battle unless you were underwater. Only one person in the world (the real world) would be able to catch Arceus on their copy of the game. Everyone would be dead and no economies would exist, since the only way to get to many towns requires going through grass where Pokémon so strong that they can give a level 40 team a run for its money lay in wait.
Also this:
There are thirty-five legendaries in all, almost all of which can now be caught through regular gameplay throughout the five fourth-gen games (including some as part of the main storyline). Shouldn't legendaries be, y'know, legendary? In a way other than stats?
By that logic -- you shouldn't be able to do "legendary" stuff in "regular gameplay" -- 99% of people should never be allowed to beat any JRPG, and especially not the bonus bosses, regardless of how much they level up, because the odds against everything working out and you actually saving the world are astronomical in the narrative. Although I have a feeling you'd actually support that.
If Pokémon were an MMO, you'd have a point, but so long as they're considered to primarily be single-player JRPGs (and you said that you don't consider the multiplayer modes of Pokémon worthy of any consideration), everyone should be able to do everything in the game.
Oh, and this:
there's no reason to change it to work that way when one other JRPG works that way.
One other JRPG that was made by Creatures (back when they were Ape). Just sayin'.
(Not to mention that Paper Mario does it too.)
