>>41087022Hard 4/10.
Neat ideas & concepts with some admittedly good Pokemon created, and characters like Nessa are beautiful & some of the series best, but for all the good things SWSH does, it’s negated by an exponentially larger amount of bad things that hang over the game like a dark cloud. The games look mechanically less impressive than console spin-offs of consoles prior & less powerful than The Switch, and the amount of overall content in these games is far less for $60 than on the $40 handheld games from decades ago. The Wild Area is underutilized & unimpressive in the grand scheme of things, they’re empty, despite being big, and matters not because you can’t even catch overleveled Pokemon in the first place until real late in the game, and the large-scale cities, which you would expect to be filled with people, ring similar as empty, which really makes you scratch your head on just why these cities were made so large in the first place despite not being necessary. The Dynamaxing system is unnecessary fluff that adds nothing mechanically new to the Pokemon formula & only serves to pad out battles more, but only certain battles, as they can’t be used in a grand majority of the game, like in certain trainer battles or the Wild Area, unlike the Mega Evolutions from the last two Generations. The game is overall very short for it’s high price when benchmarked against other Switch games, there’s models & animations that look choppy & unfinished, floating over environments, frame drops exist when they absolutely shouldn’t on this hardware - there’s a whole host of small issues that make up a large, glaring problem, like holes in a blanket that’s intended to keep you warm. The central issue is Game Freak itself, whose lead developers have repeatedly lied about reasons for cutting content & making unnecessary changes, while bragging about small development fluff - such arrogance should not be rewarded.
