>>32055558The story itself was fine, but sitting through it was almost unendurable. You're stopped every five seconds, and most of the time it's for something meaningless. Hell, the cutscene when you pick your starter is almost five minutes long. Resetting for a specific nature or gender (which tons of people did the latter because of Popplio) was a goddamn nightmare because of that shit. There are times when I just want to go from route to route without interruption. Having large cutscenes every once in a while, like one when you enter a new town for the first time, is fine, I'm not against cutscenes as a whole, but you had to inch along every town being blocked off from just about everything until you followed the blinking guide on the bottom screen from cutscene to cutscene until the game finally agrees that you've had enough and gives you permission to play the goddamn game.
SM are by far better games than XY, but SM was a lot harder to finish than XY because XY doesn't interrupt you nearly as often, even if the characters that interrupt you are the most grating pieces of shit in XY.
They needed to cut down hard on the cutscenes that only had character interaction and nothing moving the story forward, ESPECIALLY for fucking Lillie. I never thought it would be possible but I might hate Lillie more than Zinnia despite Lillie being much better written, because the entire game she wouldn't leave me alone. She progressed as a character at a goddamn snail's pace. Maybe they could've brought back a phone service like the Pokégear and let you call your friends at various points of the game, with them often having new dialogue as you clear through routes, and stuffed all the unnecessary cutscenes in there as long as they didn't rely heavily on multiple NPCs interacting together.
The quality of writing is just lost on me when it's distracting from the gameplay. The only cutscenes I really liked were the ones that involved Team Skull, because they're all just loveable.
