>>29812224The island trials are all horribly boring mini sidequest until you battle the totem. Not many interesting gimmicks and since they take space from the region, you have less to explore on your own. XY had quite a lot handholding, but here in SM you have handholding over the whole main game with only a couple of spots you can freely explore. The league at the end was quite good. E4 all have 5 pokemon, but the levels were low in that point.
Content is even more poor as in XY. The main game isn't longer than the already mentioned 17 hours with exploring all kind of stuff in there. The post game story is even less. No explorable town. Seems like there's a Anabel/Looker sidequest. Battle Tree only having 9 NPCs wasn't really suprising. No Zygarde side story for the post game was also a dissapointment since it would haved mean a longer post game. Also a legendary here and there.
Pokemon distribution is quite messy. Either one route have multiple species or only 2-3. Alola pokemon appear quite often at the beginning, but in later routes more rare. Type distribution is also a bit messy.
overall for a 20th anniversary game and aftter all that hype it got, it's the most dissapointing pokemon game for me yet. Almost no post game content, weak to maximum ok story, bad region with handholding and scripts over the whole time, less pokemon in the dex than XY, linear as fuck and for me personally competively bad new pokemon, it's landing last spot of my fav gen list tied with the first generation. Just dissapoining.
