>>36809217A nice game but compared to later ones it lacks a bunch of quality of life updates. Examples of early installment weirdness that are bad include:
- You can evolve only one Pokemon at once
- Your inventory forever stays at 2 pages which is kinda bad when later dungeons get longer and longer
- Decent amount of Pokemon have stupidly low spawn rates, are locked behind Lv. 1 dungeons or both. The worst offender is Chansey who appears on maybe three floors of Lv. 1 dungeon 1% of the time. Notably, things that are common in main games like Pidgey or Caterpie suffer from this.
- For WHATEVER reason, you cannot bring more than three Pokemon to a dungeon even though the party size caps at four Pokemon (and six stars of size IIRC) with the fourth slot being used for either recruits or escorted clients.
- Friend Areas are nice idea but awkwardly executed, with legendaries being the worst: some come with the Area but some don't and you have to buy it from Wigglytuff.
- Blizzard is hard to get and when you get it, turns out it hits a single tile (they fixed that in Explorer) so you worked for nothing.
- Some of the evolution items are locked behind Wish Cave shops. Not that it matters unless you're going for 100% or like the evolved form more, because you can turn NFE into a god if you know what you're doing
- Speaking of which, most of final stages are unrecruitable (there's only 9 you can). If Pokemon has three stages like the starters, the middle one starts with -19% rate, meaning you're most likely going to have to start with the lowest stage in the family who don't have recruit rate all over the place
- Probably other things I forgot about.
The game is definitely harder than main series and Sky Tower will make you cry. Speaking of which, there are few points where the plot wants you to take a break, at which point you need to do mission from the bulletin board. Each new cutscene is 2 to 4 missions of waiting afaik.
