the difficulty scaling was working fine for about 80% of the game and then it just seemed to completely unravel and i found myself in encounters with monsters i literally one shot at the start of the battle standing next to monsters that take 7-8 turns to kill.

in theory this is a solution for outpacing content in an open world pokemon, but in practice it needs more refinement. and while they provide the knobs for you tweak in menus, it isn't as granular as one would expect and ultimately feels like design oversight.