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I tried playing them when they first came out and quit once I got to the second island.
I've started playing Sun for the first time since then and I've come to realize it's immensely more enjoyable when you simply start mashing the A button as fast as possible any time Lily shows her ugly mug or when you're forced into a cutscene; now it actually feels like I'm almost going on an island adventure that is my own.
I god damn love tropical islands and the ocean; they could have made this region so bloody good and instead they decided to put their focus on boring characters instead of exploration.
When the games transitioned to 3D they should have abandoned the concept of routes and instead tried to make things more open and Alola was the perfect chance for them to do this since unlike other regions that are set in much larger environments where they're forced to be more restrictive as to where players can go, Alola was already naturally restrictive because the region is just a bunch of small islands and this could have been used advantageously to shove a ton of interesting stuff and allowed it to be open ended instead of linear. This would have allowed SM to avoid the problem most openworld games have of being too large and filled with nothing.
Literally the perfect opportunity and they wasted it.