Needless to say, the 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, but the main games aren’t intended to be especially difficult. Game Freak’s goal was to create an inviting, accessible RPG experience that all ages can enjoy, and they certainly struck gold on that score.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that Pokémon SwordandShielddon’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 the much-beloved Marnie more than anything else. They weren’t exactly 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 them.
9 Breeder Chloe
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 Chloe.
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 going to feature in this list, Opal calls Ballonlea’s Fairy-type gym home. Her mission is very different from those that the other leaders offer, taking the form of a series of simultaneous battles and quiz questions.
As with most gym leaders, the difficulty of the battle is really a matter 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 Masters
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 management, 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 challenge you to a match once a day and offer a prize (an evolution item for Milcery, 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 Zamazenta.
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, either.
5 Hop (Champion Cup)
Now, the fanbase’s opinions on Hop may be mixed (as is always the case with rivals), but there’s 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 typings, 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 Hop was troublesome, then his big brother Leon was even more so.
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 Eternatus
Any match that requires the game to give 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 story’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, the highest any Pokémon has ever had by quite some distance), making for a long and epic match.
2 Gigantamax Snorlax
Speaking 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 it 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 any 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 And Shield: All The Gym Leaders, Ranked By Difficulty
