YMMV / Pokémon Zeta and Omicron

aka: Pokemon Zeta Omicron

• Difficulty Spike: Everything from the E4 upwards in Vesryn, and much of Aroma. The E4 forces you to change your battle style to set, which doesn't give free switches after defeating a Pokémon, and the later battles have you fighting Pokémon up to level 120! If you actually try to set your battle style back to shift, the game will simply ignore it.
• Game-Breaker: As long as you have enough money to get it to the point, the Secret Base — it's entirely possible to have Pokemon at level 80 once you get there, as demonstrated by this guide. Outside of insane leveling up, if you're lucky, you can get access to the TMs for Hyper Beam and Earthquake long before they would otherwise be available in other games. And of course, as noted below under Good Bad Bugs, you could also use it to gain access to lv. 120 Pokemon in the Aroma region.
• Good Bad Bugs: By exploiting the Day Care being moved to the Secret Base during the story in Aroma, you can bring over up to two Pokémon from Vesryn before finishing the story in Aroma. Like a level 120 Garchomp.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The very existence of the Dragon/Steel-type CyberGoomy, after its evolutions ended up getting part Steel-type regional variants in Pokémon Legends: Arceus.
• Junk Rare: For some reason, Spearow has a 2% chance of appearing on one route, only during daytime.
• Obvious Beta: The whole game is significantly underpolished and bug-ridden, which is the whole reason why the online features were removed, and why a planned successor, Epsilon, has almost only the Vesryn region in common with this game. The piss-poor battle move animation library can pass, because it's an issue with Essentials itself. Other than that, its soundtrack consists of almost nothing but stock Essentials music, certain post-game boss areas are never locked, the selection would immediately go back to the last button used when moving it immediately after going back to the last menu, the level curve is atrocious, the legendaries and certain stationary-encountered mons are Permanently Missable Content (especially the safari legendaries), and the Aroma region arc is broken everywhere. There, for example, the level curve is no different, and the gym leaders don't use the gym leader battle theme.
• That One Boss:
  • Miranda, the eighth gym leader, is this to a lot of people. She uses Fire-types, which wouldn't be such a problem if there wasn't permanent sun in her gym, increasing the power of fire type moves by 50%. Additionally, you fight her in a multi battle along with your rival, whose Pokémon are nearly useless against hers and will likely leave you in a 2 vs 1 situation before long.
  • Also, the Safari Zone Legendaries. They're found in a few Safari Zones, and can only be caught using the regular Safari Balls. They also flee during battle, and if they do, they're gone forever. And there are four of them. Prepare for a lot of Save Scumming.
• That One Level:
  • The "sneak into the Pokehadron Collider" segment of the plot is very long and has you taking an extremely long route north while fighting trainers and Pokémon with no, repeat, no places along the route to stop and rest or get more healing items. Also, a lot of the trainers use Steel-types in the rain, making it hard to counter them with Fire attacks (assuming you even have a Pokémon who knows Fire attacks by then, which can also be hard).
  • Mt. Press likely qualifies as well. True, it has a few Nurse Joys strung along the way to ease things somewhat, but you can't fly off of it and Odin/Zeus, sitting in the heart of Mt.Press, is packing nightmarishly strong Pokémon. A solo run with a Pokémon of the wrong type can be impossible.

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