Reposting my opinion
Overall I thought it was pretty solid and the devs should work on another game with what they've learned. Story was alright, I expected worse but it worked, but the twist at the end became kind of obvious.
The main problem is the fuckhuge difficulty spike after around the 5th gym or so, when XP starts becoming incredibly scarce and insufficient to meet the demands of the level curve. That might have been because I hacked in a Devimp, the game's pseudolegendary first stage, which was a fuckhuge xp siphon for fuckall reward until it evolves at a whopping level 72, but considering how overleveled my tiny party was before that everyone must have felt the effects.
Also, I spent about two hours sped up 3x grinding at the ninja dojo, and still only had enough xp to maintain this as my final team. Only five pokemon. That said, the boss fights are challenging enough to be fun without being frustrating, but what is frustrating are the fucking hordes of trainers you start having to go through in every route after a certain point in the game. I cannot imagine playing this without speedhack.
Fakemon designs ranged from awful to cool, honestly the devs should have just cut out some of the fakemon, especially those like Duplicat and Ratsy that are literally just redrawn Smeargle and Ditto. Most of them have decent concepts behind them, but poor execution. NotPopplio needs a better face, Yatagaryu's earlier stages look awkward as fuck, and in general the spiting was pretty inconsistent and easily the weakest part of the game. I kind of liked how Beliaddon was literally my mom's demon, enough to have it be an xp siphon for fuckknows how long. Too many fakemon lines are three stage though, which is really unnecessary to pull off a concept and just pokedex bloat, there's a reason GF doesn't do many three stage lines. Strangely enough, the starters are among the few two-stages, but I guess they couldn't think of how to do middle stages or proper megas.
