>>418606733.5/10
A shallow experience all around:
Story: Almost non-existent and 80% of it takes place within the streets of each town as you show up.
Towns and routes: No reason to come back to the majority of these once you have visited them the first time. The only buildings outside of the towns are the nurseries. No optional content like caves/etc, just a few tms across rivers.
Characters: Okay, but not capable of salvaging the story.
Battles: The only battle that actually challenges trainers in any meaningful way is the one with Leon.
Gyms: Felt more fleshed out, the league being a bigger deal was nice.
Pokemon: As to be expected, not every design will appeal to everyone. The models look a lot better now that we don’t have the thick outlines.
Gimmicks: Lazy.
Wild Area: The most content-packed area of the game. Offers a lot if diverse pokemon before you even challenge the first gym. Unfortunately the area itself doesn’t feel natural. Far too many pokemon appear at one time and there is very little biome diversity, it feels like some Professor Oak’s lab and somehow worse than a safari zone. The weather transitions are also incredibly jarring. The amount of dens/pokemon here just feel like a means to distract the player from the lack of content elsewhere.
Customization: Feels like there are less options than previous games.
QoL Improvements: One of the few things where it felt like they actually considered feedback from previous games.
Gamefreak had a chance to hit it out of the park with the move to the Switch and instead it felt like they made most aspects of the game even more shallow than they had with the 3DS games.
