>>59011637GS and XY are actually shockingly similar in a lot of ways. They both were rushed out for marketing reasons, and both had huge map changes partway through development. However, the difference is their areas of focus. GS had no time to balance the campaign, so they made it super easy to not be DQ2, and instead focused on making it a living world which at the time was kind of groundbreaking (Animal Crossing was doing similar things on much better hardware art the time). On the other hand, XY focused on smoothing out the campaign to the exclusion of everything else, but the campaign isn't interesting enough to carry the game and the side content being lacking is a bit of a disappointment. I could say similar things about SM, but they dropped the ball on the micro of map design this time (on a macro level it's still 3/4 better than XY), but decided to not playtest some of the battle content into oblivion and instead save it for debugging and it's the best part of the game.
