Why doesn't Game Freak just add a "Hard Mode" where every pokemon is 2-5 levels higher to their games...

you're underselling it
Its not just higher levels, challenge mode gives trainers better ai, better ivs on their pokemon, extra held items sometimes, altered movesets, and even gives gym leaders extra pokemon
The worst thing about challenge mode is that unlocking is is fucking asinine

Yeah

No it's Lucario by a long shot. Lucario has 17060 vs 14672 of Gardevoir. Use rule34.xxx for raw numbers since e621 has sfw and rule34.xxx pulls directly from it and other sources

Lol

>Goodra in the top 20
I find this funny for some reason

it's the ultimate fetishbait mon, where braixen was the perfect vanilla furfag bait

they calculated this

Pokemon Legends actually changed some statistical values and now levels matter less, so maybe Gen 9 has an actual chance

Going against high leveled mon with a team of lv 1 shitmons is not a hard mode

A good hard mode would be if all the trainers you fought had max ivs and max evs, battle items and a smarter AI

Many, many years ago someone from /vp/ has asked Masuda and Ohmori about that and their answers(in particularly Masuda's) has permanently mindbroken /vp/ forever
archive.alice.al/vp/thread/21918111/#21921231
>Real OP here. I asked about the difficulty setting.
>Masuda: *laughs* I don't really know.
>Ohmori: *laughs* If we implemented that feature, nobody would be able to beat the game then!

>Here are their autographs for all you forgers out there