Great Idea For the Next Game

[ogregames64]

When you're on your way into the first gym, someone stops you abs says you must have 4 pokemon on your team. When you head to the gym with 4 pokemon (the trigger for this event), the villain team steals something and you must chase them to the next town.
At the next town you try to challenge the gym, but the leader is not there... go to the next town.
You get in the gym and battle the trainers, then the leader is abducted!
At the next town, you battle the leader, but surprise he wasn't really the leader. ..and so on.
You make it through the whole map and never get to challenge a gym. When the villain team is defeated and you've covered the entire region, you get to challenge the the gym leaders, on high levels, with full teams and then challenge the elite four and champion. It's like 2 games in one!

 

[Kallyle]

When you're on your way into the first gym, someone stops you abs says you must have 4 pokemon on your team. When you head to the gym with 4 pokemon (the trigger for this event), the villain team steals something and you must chase them to the next town.
At the next town you try to challenge the gym, but the leader is not there... go to the next town.
You get in the gym and battle the trainers, then the leader is abducted!
At the next town, you battle the leader, but surprise he wasn't really the leader. ..and so on.
You make it through the whole map and never get to challenge a gym. When the villain team is defeated and you've covered the entire region, you get to challenge the the gym leaders, on high levels, with full teams and then challenge the elite four and champion. It's like 2 games in one!

While that sound like a very good concept, there is one big problem with this: don't you need a certain amount of badges to get traded Pokémon to listen to you? Although they could theoretically save the ability to trade for the post game, a lot of fans won't be happy about that. That, and the fact that you now need badges to use HMs once again...

 

[ogregames64]

I didn't think about that. These could have simple work arounds, though: being able to use HMs right away, and the level of traded pokemon must be equal the level of your own highest level trained pokemon before it will obey.

 

[League]

Per my head-canon gym leaders don't face trainers with their full teams, or even necessarily with pokemon from their main teams. I believe such because I have to otherwise believe that all trainers would have to mimic the journeys of the player character, no matter their actual origin. (Then again, in Generation 1 and 3, the player character does face the gym he first comes across at another point in his journey. There's some potential give and take to my head canon, and it really needn't be the case in every region.)

Your idea is good for preserving story and adding a challenge run element to the game. It unfortunately features and requires the same unlikely event essentially occur again and again, however.

It'd be better if you just faced the gym leaders again. These could be their real teams if concession were to be made to my hc. The gym leaders would award you "Challenge Badges" for beating them: they could also post limitations on what pokemon, moves and items you use, who knows.

If you didn't have the ability to travel across the region with Fly at this point, then the travel really would make revisiting all those towns again feel something like a second journey. Each gym could have a "Challenge Entrance" to a room or series of with different or more complex puzzles than the regular gym.

 

[ogregames64]

That's an interesting idea: the challenge gym room. Each gym has a special challenge open only to trainers that have defeated the elite four (or each gym could have different retirements)
All of this gym talk has me re-wishing we had the ability to run our own gyms. I really want to be gym leader in the game!

 

[godiego]

Sounds more of a headache than anything.