>>23580951Honestly, I think it is because it's not a single system but a compendium of different ones.
If you have played other tabletops you can see that its main flaw is the overcomplicated/ convoluted/superfluous mechanics that plague all through it.
First of all, excess classes.
Under the disguise of customization, adding more classes does not mean that your character does whatever you want, why? because of all the pre-requisites needed to get them.
This is not customization, this is mechanization.
A system such as Pokémon is already incredibly complex (with 18 types, hundreds of moves and abilities and 721 Pokémon its a lot to learn already)
Second, the excess focus on Trainers over Pokémon.
Trainers should be simple, they claim that character creation is simple and fast but it can take hours if you are not familiar with tabletops in general. Besides, there's a 500+ pages book which focus mostly on how trainer works, Pokémon have their own book which is bulbapedia with a few perks for the tabletop.
Third, extreme book keeping, this means that you can never play without pausing every few minutes to check something in the book, over 1200 pages (if you count both corebook and pokedex)
Fourth, broken balance. If you know what you are doing it's incredibly easy to break the game and destroy power balance (just use a single Pokémon and you'll see) To compensate for this the rules put mechanic over mechanic over mechanic to try to patch it up but it's simply not doable without house ruling or gm fiats.
Fifth, Autism. It opens the door to lots of autism and cringy content thanks to their fanon mechanics of changing type to Pokémon and special snowflake "shinies", This one obviously depends more on the players but still.
I could go on, but I conclude by saying that there is also no good narrative system on PTA/PTU to make make it enjoyable, the books are flavorless all the good campaigns I've seen run are mostly thanks to good GM's not to a good system.
