>>57232975At launch I really liked X&Y, it was not perfect but overall I thought it was good.
Lately I am revisiting the whole series alongside my friend who likes Pokémon but never got into the games, and honestly seeing the XY after RBY really shows how the Kanto fanservice is ass in XY. It felt like nothing more than soulless rehashing for the sake of attracting older millennials who then finally had disposable incomes and it made me notice how sidelined are the cute and cool new Kalosian mons.
The story has some cool ideas, like AZ or the comical~serious hypocrisy of Team Flare, but its whole friend group thing was just a bad copy of the Gen 4 rival, Cheren and Bianca with a bad love story shoved in, and Professor Sycamore comes across as a weirdo because he never challenges Lysandre's schizo ramblings.
I know story is a low bar in Pokémon but it's just a bummer with XY because it had potential to be a good story for a kids' game.
Being 20 levels above the Gym Leaders from Gym 3 onwards is just ridiculous. Exp Share All is great but where does the game even pull all this exp? We're not even grinding or trying to be overlevelled. There is no random asshole difficulty spikes due to this, to handicap yourself further than training 4+ mons you must do all sorts of crazy shit like turning off QoL Exp Share All, avoid fights or forcing yourself to not train a mon over a certain level. In none of the games we played yet we had any sort of overlevel and the games were still easy, so I get the feeling this is because either GameFreak did not balance the game or because they made it easy for people who just played to unwind.
Anyway, it's not a bad game, just mediocre and it feels cheap in retrospect, very possibly due GF still not being used to 3D development and 3D graphics (even their non-Pokémon games were all hand drawn 2d assets except for Harmoknight).
However there is something about this game that I don"t see discussed enough... (cont.)
