>>58608140That said, I had fun with my playthrough. This is almost solely due to the fact that I used a difficulty-enhancing romhack that actually makes the games systems fucking work. At a few parts of my playthrough I began having trouble with opponents overlevelling me, so I fucked off to explore areas like the Crown Tundra and Isle of Armor (which miraculously, are actually fun to explore, GF did learn from how shit the wild area was). I could hunt high level wild mons or get TMs off raids to power up my team, having to actually retreat and think of ways to get ahead by exploring and using game systems feels nice. My romhack was difficult enough that even camping was beneficial, and I actually like the idea of Pokemon camping.
Contrast this with vanilla swsh, where the moment you even fucking sneeze outside of beelining gyms you immediately become irrevocably overleveled. I can't even fucking camp with my Pokemon without ruining the game! In my first playthrough, I caught mons and did stuff, and I ended up hilariously overleveled and the game sucked balls. In my second playthrough I beelined it, and the game still sucks cock because swsh's main campaign is STILL boring as fuck and barely even finished.
The Teraleak more or less confirmed my suspicions that they could never even get a concept down for it. you can tell that the gym league sport shit, Eternatus and the dogs, and Sordward/Shieldbert were disparate ideas they never got to finish. Hell, Rose's Macro Cosmos goons don't even have unique assets. Even fucking XY had unique assets for the literal who Team Flare scientists. I fucking guarantee you the bizarre sequence where you hunt the Macro Cosmos goon three times, then walk into an elevator and that's it, was cooked up in the very last part of production when they needed to ship.
