>>56458055>>56458111>Stuff I likedThe presentation is godlike. The care put into mapping every route, making the world feel alive and inhabited with both humans and pokemon, the choreography in cutscenes, the expressiveness in both overworld sprites and the portraits, voice clips, full-artwork scenes, and the varied battle backgrounds that even shift to match the time of day all lead to an amazingly immersive experience.
At its heart this is a character driven game, not unlike Rejuv, where the pretext of gathering all of the badges to become champion only exists to get the protagonist moving initially before it's clear there's way more important things going on and the badges incidentally show up along the way. The game is successful at this by integrating the initial hook with an overall really well-rounded and likable cast that behaves in mostly-believable ways relative to their established characterizations and rarely feels like things happen or people act a certain way because the author needs them to solely in order to facilitate the next major thing happening. Everything that happens gradually builds to later things even if the immediate consequences of something aren't clear at the time. The seemingly filler sidequest about the Litwick and the autistic child who soulbonds with the protagonist? The soulbond saves the protagonist later and royal glowniggers spot Sakura in the forest leading to a chain of events eventually causing Kaleo getting infected by Nihilego later. I appreciate how these sequences don't follow the normal shit writing tropes of blatantly showing you Chekov's Gun several times and acting like it's cinema when it's fired later, yet also still have a very clear and comprehensible trail of cause and effect so the writer isn't just pulling things out of their asses either.
