>>58019184
also for specific context I didn't include due to character limit
this playthrough was when I somehow thought it'd be a good idea to do a fire/flying dualtype run under the assumption that the water gym would get nerfed in a meaningful way (aka not making you face a rain team on water surface 4 badges in)
Should also mention that every other mon in that gym had ice coverage and/or was faster than mons like my Emolga (which was generally part of my party's rotation a lot act 1 due to being a desperately needed electric type)
Which brings me to another bit of advice/another warning that explains that "90% of the game's difficulty comes from fields in some way" complaint
Expect 90% of the gyms to just be some field that buffs the type in question a lot while nerfing its counters (or even types weak to it) in varying and sometimes crippling ways, with a team built to fully abuse everything about it
And often the field will be either unchangeable, only changeable into a field that the opposing team also benefits from, or changeable for half a turn before the gym's signature move just changes it back to fuck you over

alright it sounds like i've been rambling a lot but for good reason
also these warnings are still shorter than most of the game's chapters, or at least it'll probably feel that way because essentials textboxes don't have room for a lot of text and Reborn's the only exception that tries to work around that via its dynamic textbox sizing - refer to the monoground LP in the archive rentry for an example
if you, the lurker, have read this far/scrolled past everything I said, then I guess you can look at something funny, in this case a comically bad nidoking set someone posted in a thread my monoground LP attempt (that died due to forgetting where to go after taking a several month long break because a mythical creature known as a "writefag" finished his main project and thus i didn't need to constantly have a thread up at the time)