So in the Persona series, some bosses (like the final bosses and super bosses) have the ability to act twice during all of their turns… this is to make those bosses much harder. Do you think the Pokemon series could benefit from giving some of their “bosses” such as elite 4 members, legendary pokemon, and the champion, that same trait? Despite their levels, even the Champions look like pushovers compared to competitively trained pokemon.

That would certainly make things more interesting!  I think there is a sense with the games at the moment that players should be able to do anything the AI opponents can do, which is fair enough in principle, except that players can also do some important things the AI can’t do – we can use items more freely, our Pokémon gain effort points, we get free switches after knocking opponents out, we actually make switches to gain the advantage and not just to escape completely hopeless situations, that sort of thing.  Partly this is just to do with the limitations of what the AI can handle – knowing when to switch, for example, is often built on having an intuitive understanding of a Pokémon’s general capabilities in totality – given that I don’t know my opponent’s moveset, what could it do to me if I stay in, and what could it do to me if I switch out?  That’s not really an easy thing to program an AI with.  That being the case, I think it makes a lot of sense to let powerful enemies have extra advantages, the trouble is that it’s easy to go overboard – Cynthia’s Garchomp with two moves every turn would be a nightmare, sub-par moveset notwithstanding!  Maybe a feature like that would work well in a sort of ‘challenge mode’ setting like what Black and White 2 had?  Personally I think a single player difficulty setting was an awesome idea and I’d hope to see it return in future games, just without the aggravating nonsense of Black and White 2’s key system.  Increasing opponents’ levels is great, but it also causes your Pokémon to level up faster in response, so the step up in difficulty isn’t as significant as it should be; giving certain opponents special ‘powers’ like this would go a long way towards making a run like that more interesting.  What else might you do?  Gym Leaders could have thematic advantages like damage bonuses with their favoured types; some trainers might be able to use Pokémon with both their abilities… there’s a lot of cool stuff you could mess with, if we lose the idea that the players have to be able to do it too.