>>55180950>I love the new quality of life changes which make perfecting team members no longer an arduous, "full-time job" scale taskYou mean like, in the sense of participating in the competitive PvP aspect? Because that has never been a concern for the singleplayer adventure, and even for multiplayer it could have been avoided had cheating not been possible and so prevalent back in the day. People only pursue perfection in their teams because it's expected to be able to compete (because those who cheated had it), and with every generation has been made easier and easier to level the field with cheaters.
I agree that the story is mostly enjoyable, Pokemon really benefits from focusing on a couple of central human characters and dealing with human problems, with only intermittent regular RPG fare of saving the world/environment. Though there's also some problems with the open non-linear approach since it feels like the player character is not terribly involved with the whole Team Star & school bullying saga, most of the major events for that part happened offscreen long before the protagonist moved to Paldea.
Collecting monsters is enjoyable, yeah. I just wish Game Freak really afforded themselves the dev cycles to keep the national dex aspect of collection as a focus as well instead of unceremoniously dumping it like it wasn't ever part of the core appeal. Because let's be real, that's the only reason such features aren't in, they keep pushing games out on a set schedule to appease the suits managing the rest of the media franchise, money-wise they aren't hurting and could easily make games more ambitious in scope of features and technical stability.
