>played every pokemon game until plat
>stopped playing them for years
>bought Ultra Moon a few months ago and have put in 100+ hours
Real talk, this is the best pokemon game I've ever played. There have been so many features and modernizations that have made it a joy to play and removed most of the frustrations. The UI is 100 times better than it ever was, there's character customization and dress-up, exp share works on the whole party so you don't have to grind nearly as much, there is a huge dex of available pokemon most of whom are pretty decent to good, all three of the starters are great (yes including poplio fight me), there's more actual strategy in the battles and the difficulty isn't quite as much of a baby game as it used to be (though it is still pretty easy, and megas can occasionally be a bit wonky, in theory having the option of megas and z moves to bring back life into useless pokemon is a good change), you can pet your pokemon and feed them berries, you can easily train competitive pokes, and there are a lot of quality of life changes like being able to trade without having the pokemon in your party, multi use tms, and removing HMs in favor of just having a hotkey so you don't have to keep a team full of HM slaves. Best of all, all the new features are completely optional, so you don't have to engage with the dress up or minigames or the z moves if you don't want to, you can turn off the exp share and just play how you always have.
This is the game pokemon was always meant to be, much more modern, developed, and sleek compared to gens 4 and below. If you unironically think those gens are better you are a nostalgiafag.
