>>32611465Cutscenes and railroading.
The graphics were good, the music was good, the difficulty curve was improved from Gen 6, the new Pokémon designs were good (though the distribution was terrible and so were most of their stats, but if you only use new 'mons that at least improves the difficulty curve even more), and if you remove events and NPCs from the routes and just look at the maps themselves they're pretty nicely designed sometimes.
But the cutscenes and railroading kill the entire game.
The good maps the game does have can't be explored at all until you clear the right event flags to remove the ten thousand roadblocks around you by triggering all the cutscenes (whether actual cutscenes or long dialogue sequences that you have to button mash through), and sometimes you'll enter a new town but you literally can't go past the first street because of all the roadblocks, like in the case with the Stoutland NPC. They even gutted the functionality of the touch screen so they could dedicate it to what is basically a map combined with an NPC that always tells you exactly where to go at all times. Deviating from Rotom's path is not an option because the game will stop you immediately. It never gets any better, though sometimes it seemed like it was about to they'd always throw something in your face.
And it didn't help that Lillie is completely useless as a character and cannot fend for herself until the last five seconds in the game when she
almost kills her mom. Because she's constantly with you, she's constantly getting herself into trouble and going "uguu~ I just can't do this I need my mom she does everything for me" while you act as her bodyguard. The only thing that's supposed to make her "endearing" is the fact that she's a moe anime girl, and I guess that's enough for some people, but it was just grating to me and I wanted to be away from her every time she showed up.
