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Gameplay/mechanics/feature-wise, SwSh are (arguably) the best games since gen 4. The Wild Area/online Raids etc. are more fun than nearly anything in B/W, X/Y, or Sun/Moon. It's the first time a Pokemon game has felt truly free and open, and the variety of mons you can catch/battle guarantee you'll spend many hours even just in one playthrough. For example, I only have six badges, but I have almost 30 hours total playtime so far. I've been enjoying grinding with raids and catchin' em all so much that my team is massively overleveled because I only touch the story when I have to. However...
Story/characters-wise, Sword/Shield are absolutely the WORST in the entire series. Hau is an annoying cunt, Team Yell is fucking retarded, the Chairman and all the other characters are completely generic, and the story is boring and overloaded with handholdy cutscenes even more than fucking Sun/Moon were. SwSh make Sun/Moon's stories seem like a fucking Pynchon novel.
Overall, if you take the good parts of SwSh, it's a solid 8/10, but with the bad parts it brings it down to a 7 at best, and that's being generous. It almost feels like two separate games.
tl;dr: SwSh get too much hate and have some great things about them, but also some aspects are the worst of the series.
