Needless to say, the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokémon series isn’t exactly the pinnacle of hardcore RPG action. Still, ompetitive play can get super, super heated and much more strategically rich and deep than you might think, bﷺut the main games aren’t intended to be especially difficult. ’s goal was to create an inviting, accessible RPG experience that all ages can enjoy, and they certainly struck gold on that score.

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Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokémon Sword and Shield don't have their challenging moments. Here are our picks for some of the most difficult battles in 🥂the game. Don🅺’t underestimate them (and watch out for story spoilers throughout)!

10 Chairman Rose 🐬

Sword and Shield represented quite a departure for the series in that there was no real Evil Team™ to speak of. Team Yell was a bit of a joke, serving as a bit of comic relief and as fans for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the much-beloved Marnie more than anything else. They weren’t eꦇxactl🅠y villains.

Chairman Rose, too, firmly occupied that moral gray area. When his motivations and methods were finally revealed near the close of the story, the player confronts and battles him (as Macros Cosmos’s Rose) in his Energy Plant. He wields a formidable line-up of Steel Pokémon (including powerhouses like Ferrothorn and Copperajah) and isn’t afraid to use t🍷hem.

9 ♔ Breeder Chloe𝓀

All kinds of curious things await you in Sword and Shield’s expansive Wild Area. From hidden TMs to a daycare center and different vendors, there’s a lot to see here. One notable NPC who will pop up from time to time is a rather popular trainer named Breeder Cꦆhloe.

What’s so special about her? 🍬Well, she uses all three of Galar’s starters at a relatively high level (getting progressively stronger as the player advances through the game), and she can be much more threatening than you might think. She awards a good amount of money on her defeat, too, so she’s worth seeking out.

8 Opal

The first of two gym leaders we’re goiౠng to feature in this list, Opal calls Ballonlea’s Fairy-type gym home. Her mission is very different fꦗrom those that the other leaders offer, taking the form of a series of simultaneous battles and quiz questions.

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As with most gym leaders, the difficulty of the battle is really a matterꦐ of the match-up, and, in this case, it's how well you’re prepared for the Fairy-types you’ll encounter. There's another complicating factor, though; answering the questions correctly will give your Pokémon a stat boost, while a wrong answer will have the opposite effect. As such, if you aren’t paying attention, the battle against Opal can go south very, very quickly.

7 The Café M✤asters 🃏

Players who are simply hurrying along through the story should have a relatively comfortable ride. Some battles will be roadblocks depending on type matchups, sure, but with a little grinding and some careful team manageme🍸nt, most experienced gamers should make it through to the other side.

However, certain optional battles can be no joke. Wyndon, Motostoke, and Hammerlocke are home to Battle Cafés which should be familiar to players of recent entries in the series. Here, you’ll find the Café Masters, who will challeꦉnge you to a match once a day and offer a prize (an evolution item for Milc🃏ery, among other possibilities) if you win. The trouble is, their little Fairies-that-look-like-food duo is quite high-level and can be difficult to handle. Watch out, there’s a postgame spoiler coming up next!

6 Sordward And Shielbert ꧋

This pesky pair serve as the villains of Sword and Shield’s brief postgame. When the player and rival Hop head back ⭕to the Slumbering Weald, they encounter these two mysterious men, who appear to have a connection to the Legendary Pokémon Zacian and Zama🌳zenta.

The first encounter between the foursome doesn’t go so well, and a battle ensues. This being the postgame, levels are high, and no quarter is given. Hop, in fact, is defeated, which leads to the duo taking off with one of the Legendary Pokémon’s artifacts.⛦ This isn’t the only match with them,ꦰ either.

5 ꦗ Hop (Champion Cup) 💧

Now, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the𒁏 fanbase’s opinions on Hop may bཧe mixed (as is always the case with rivals), but there’sꦛ one thing nobody can deny: he’s certainly a spirited young man who always tried his very best. As such, it was a little heart-breaking to end his dream personally in the Champion Cup.

Unlike most Champion Cup opponents, Hop actually had a varied team in terms of typin🙈gs, so he really could be a bit of a challenge if you weren’t prepared for something he brought to the table.

4 Leon

As we saw in the last entry, a varied team with no particularly glaring shared weakness is always a little worrying to go up against. If 𝕴Hop was troublesome, then his big brother Leon was even more so.

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Of course, Leon wasn💙’t about to relinquish the title of Galar Champion without a fight, so he brings his full might to bear against the player. He has an excellent team of super scary Pokémon, including Aegislash, Dragapult and the enormous, furious, Godzilla-on-actual-fire that is Gigantamax Charizard. He was not kidding around here.

3 ෴ Eternamax Et🌜ernatus

Any match that requires the game to gꦇive you two Legendary Pokémon as allies is going to be a humdinger. If it’s a four-on-one match, too, it’s also safe to assume that said one is going to be one heck of an opponent. Eternamax Eternatus definitely didn’t disappoint on that score.

As the main s𒁏tory’s last big dramatic setpiece, Eternatus overloads itself with power (thanks to Rose’s shenanigans). It transforms into Eternamax Eternatus (which isn’t accessible in the game, sadly), and Zacian and Zamazenta hop in to join forces with the player and Hop in a climactic battle to quell the beast atop the Tower Summit. While it isn’t especially powerful, Eternatus has monstrous HP and defenses in this form (base 255 and 250 respectively, t♕he highest any Pokémon has ever had by quite some distance), making for a long and epic match.

2 Gigantamax Snorlax �🐎�

S💞peaking of bulky powerhouses that absolutely cannot be taken down, like, ever, here comes our enormous "look ma, there’s a whole village on my stomach" friend, Gigantamax Snorlax.

Gen I fan-favorite Snorlax was always likely to get a Gigantamax form, and what a doozy it is. If you want one, though, you had to defeat it in a Max Raid in the Wild Area, which is no easy feat. Not only does the HP boost make 𝓀it incredibly difficult to deal with, but it has solid coverage it can use to take down its four attackers relatively quickly. In the metagame, too, it’s an excellent pick, with G-Max Replenish (which has a fifty-fifty chance to recover ꦏany used berries) being a huge headache for opponents.

1 Raihan

Finally, for the second of the two gym leaders who made our run-down, it’s the Dragon-type master Raihan. His team has a couple of very unique qualities that make the final gym battle in Sword and Shield by far the most complex.

Firstly, Raihan doesn’t rigidly stick to Dragon-types only, meaning a little more thought than usual is going to go into ♏this one. Not only that, but he actually challenges the player to a doubles battle—as do his gym trainers🌸)—and employs weather strategies. Not just one type of weather, either, but several! Things get dangerously close to competitive VGC format battles here, and the AI scares us just a little.

NEXT: Pokémon Sword Andಞ Shield: All The Gym Leaders, Ranked By Difficulty