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i'm just going to try to keep the review short, since honestly a lot has already been covered by others
this game, despite the overreliance on anime tropes, has by far the most entertaining and actually well put together story and cast of characters of probably any game we've played. this is on top of a top tier presentation and an overall mostly competent gameplay experience. i liked the fact that unlike eric's games enemies were using full teams quite comfortably and the game wasn't completely braindead, though still easy, and the area design was (mostly) on point, more on that later
things that I was a bit apprehensive of early on, like the weird quality of some of the portraits, the shillmon giveaway as a starter, and the very strict adherence to what just seemed to be a super basic pokemon game were all completely done away with by the end.
it's common in a lot of shonen anime for them to have one really strong arc and then a bunch of meh ones, and this game mostly just feels like one really strong arc pretty much constantly since the 3rd badge.
unfortunately, as i've sort of been alluding to throughout my playthrough, there's definitely parts that...do not make this perfect. the intro of the game was just very boring, for one, but there were still a bunch of weird railroad filler arcs all throughout or certain areas (especially towards the end) which were annoying as fuck to navigate. it's still a net positive i think since a large reason why they were annoying was because i wanted to get to the next kino plot segment as fast as possible, but i do think the gameplay takes a hit from it.
to compare, i tried above and beyond to explore in Z. i didn't do that in this game as overall i just got kind of annoyed at how much fluff was mandatory to get through so i didn't really have a desire to go back through other fluff that wasn't.
