You know how we all complain nowadays about how Pokémon games are a bit too hand-holdy? Well, when we were kids, many of us actually needed that. We were dumb. We didn’t know what was going on. Reading? Never met her.

While the formula of Pokémon might be a known quantity to us at this point in our lives, things weren’t that simple when we were kids. Today, we’ll be looking at ten aspects of Pokémon games that were difficult as kids, but are easy to understand now. Let’s get into it.

10 Type Matchups

There are like, 40 different typings in Pokémon and that is just a fact. Trying to remember which type was strong against others as a child is truly a Herculean feat. While some of the easy matchups like fire, water, and grass were simple, literally what is poison-type good against? How is a seven year old supposed to master the elements? It’s a difficult proposition to try and get down, even as a fully adult human being. To this day, what is poison good against? There’s just no way to know.

9 EVs

Remember when you were a kid and your Blissey was maxed out on attack EVs because you really just didn’t have a care in the world? Yeah, the entire concept of EVs isn’t readily explained in the games, so you might be completely unaware of how to properly train your Pokémon if you don’t know that they exist. Granted, EVs aren’t really majorly important when you’re only playing the story of a Pokémon game, but they point still stands.

8 Champion Battles

Cynthia. The nightmares that woman caused us as children is still haunting. Depending on which Pokémon game that you grew up with, the champion battle might not have provided as much of a challenge as others were faced with, but a tremendous amount of Max Revives were probably used either way.

If you still wake up in a cold sweat thinking of Garchomp, then this entry certainly applies to you. If you remember who Diantha is in the slightest, you don’t count. You really just do not.

7 Catching Legendaries

The catch rate of legendaries certainly varies from game to game, but there’s no doubt that it’s easier to do in the later games, and, you know, as fully grown humans. Facing Lugia, Kyogre, and Dialga (or that mythical that you Action Replay’d yourself over to) back in the day felt like a battle of epic proportions. Giratina? Forget about it. Catching legendaries doesn’t feel nearly as special as it used to. Sword and Shield did work to make it feel like an event again, which was nice to see. Maybe part of the reason that it was so difficult to catch those legendaries in the past has to do with the next entry.

6 The Concept Of Status Moves

Back in the day, (this might not be widespread and just a personal thing, but still) you just had four different attacking moves with no discernable differences between them. Status moves just didn’t seem worth it. If they weren’t damaging your opponent, why even try it? Now, if a move had a secondary effect with a chance to inflict some sort of status ailment, that was perfect. But, we didn’t waste our time with attacks that would have clearly helped us out all of the time. That’s just silly.

5 Physical/Special Moves

Really starting to question if this is an everyone thing, but physical and special moves also didn’t really, click… at all. How were us children to know that Waterfall was a physical move? We were big confused about everything.

Sword and Shield will actually tell you whether moves are special or physical, which is super helpful. That 100% did not happen in older games. We were just left to our own devices, wondering what exactly it was that poison-types did. A whole mess. We really thought we were about to beat Iris with no concept of anything at all, huh?

4 Weird Evolution Methods

If a Pokémon wasn’t evolving by level, it just wasn’t going to evolve. Unless you had the internet available to you at all times, trying to figure out how to evolve Feebas was absolutely impossible. While evolution methods only got weirder as time went on (turning the 3DS upside down, literally who thought of that), they were still pretty difficult sometimes back in the day. Shout out to all of us that had no friends to complete trade evolutions with. Those were the days, huh?

3 Roaming Pokémon

Roaming Pokémon are just the worst that have ever existed and that is fact. They were even worse back in the day, when you didn’t quite understand that leaving and going on to a route over and over again would eventually summon them to your location. We were just desperately flying to them and praying that they wouldn’t leave. How naive we were. But if you want to talk about being naive…

2 Dissecting Internet Rumors

Trying to figure out what is real and what is fake on the internet is pretty easy now, but back in the day, we were out there trying to challenge Mewthree to a battle. Never did find that guy…

Believeing people on the internet used to be a thing that you could just kind of do with no reprecussions. Everyone lied, but we had no idea. Why would someone that we didn’t know not tell us the truth? That just can’t be real, right?

1 HMs

Even today, this still rings true. Why did HMs need to exist? Even as kids, we knew that those were completely ridiculous and didn’t need to be a part of the game. Diamond and Pearl were probably the worst offenders for HMs, but it wasn’t until Sun and Moon that they were eliminated for good. That could not have come fast enough.

NEXT: Pokémon Sword & Shield: 7 Of The Best Areas (& 3 That Are Just Terrible)