>>39954382I actually really love the core gameplay loop - overworld wild Pokemon is cool, removing true wild battles didn't really ruin anything for me and chaining was neat, if slightly tedious. Follower and riding Pokemon was cool, and I really like Kanto as a region despite all the shit it gets.
Despite all that I STILL couldn't recommend this to an average Pokemon/RPG player in good faith. For everything I think they did right, it suffers from too many retarded decisions. Example: They had the right idea that the battle system could do with some streamlining, but then got rid of really good features (held items, abilities) and kept things that didn't need to be there (IVs) while building even stranger shit on top of what they replaced (Awakening values come to mind). It also has all the same flaws that are now typical of nu-Game Freak like a lack of satisfying postgame, and weird changes that don't make much sense like replacing a perfectly good rival with a bootleg version of himself. Some parts of the game feel straight-up incomplete, the biggest one I can think of being that they gave player 2 an overworld model but they can't interact with anything at all on the overworld, making their presence utterly pointless - like they came up with the 2P feature but never finished their brainstorming meeting on what it'd actually be good for.
tl;dr the game is pretty bad, but not for the reasons people typically point to like the new wild system.
