>>31352233HM's were awful but served as road blocks to prevent you from sequence breaking. The ride pokemon are way better, but still halfassed since half the road blocks in this game are people riding dogs, and captain gates which makes me wonder whats the point? Isn't lapras the only mandatory ride mon, for that one tiny section all the way on island 3?
And it really fucking sucks that we can't optionally surf between islands in a region composed of 4 islands. If they actually made water routes pretty looking with reefs and corsola or something in the shallow areas, instead of the same boring sea graphics people wouldn't have complained about too much water.