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this is certainly a game kek. forgoing the usual review structure on this one cuz why not
The game looks good, the music's good, spriting is decent (not a fan of the fact that trainer sprites are used instead of portraits), gameplay is mostly competent, side content is funny and overall worth doing for the silliness, story has some genuinely touching and entertaining moments.
The problem is that you have just a few too many cracks that do make this unfortunately less than the sum of its parts.
The gameplay is SERVICEABLE to an extent, but the fact that there's no element that really jumped out at me as 'outstanding' highlighted how really fucking annoying certain parts were, for instance. The mountain ice puzzles being unsolvable at times, the poison sewer, the 8th gym puzzle, etc.
The story hit its beats, but is noticeably rushed. It basically feels like almost everything that's actually remotely interesting about the villains occurs in just a handful of scenes, and for a large part of the game the narrative doesn't really have anything appealing to it, basically feeling a lot like a 'normal Pokemon game plot' especially when compared to the more off the walls side content. And for what it's worth, the more serious aspects of the story I didn't think enmeshed well with the weirdness of the game in general, though they worked well enough separately.
That does seem to be a common line that this game does things WELL, just not amazing. Outside of some things like how Baobab plays at your champion match when you assemble his band which is a fucking amazing payoff for how simple it is it did admittedly feel hard to be invested especially when the game's humor dipped into more meandering and unfocused territory.
