It's tedium incarnate. Routes are too long, packed with trainers who do too much damage to you even if you manage to have a type advantage.
Evolutions are fucked. Oh, you caught a high-level mushroom cunt? Don't expect it to evolve ever. The whole system is garbage and deincentivizes catching tems as you progress. You're better off catching a whole team on the first island so you can have a whole team of fully evolved mons.
The double battle system encourages having multiples of the same type. Why would I have a Mushook (Toxic/Melee) that doesn't provide any great coverage and whose pre-evo I can only catch on island 3 when I could just do Ganki/Nessla from the first island and cheese everything? It's better to have two water, two fire, and two plant than to have a diverse team.
Also the creatures suck. They are ugly, don't look like their typing, and have shitty moves. Even random wild mons can nearly knock you out if you fail to run away, which happens way too often.
Also along w the not being able to run away, there's no consistent repel, and even when using Scent you can run into three tem battles in 10 steps in dungeons.
Don't even get me started on breeding. Pokemon has finally seen its mistakes after all these years so you can make a runthrough Mon competitively viable. You'd think temtem would take notes, but they've made the whole thing worse. I'd never even consider making a comp temtem team.
The gameplay is fun in as much as it's a Pokemon clone, but it's way way way fucking more tedious. I can't bring myself to finish island three. I just don't want to do a million more battles that all go the same and that even if I play them optimally, I'll still have to fully heal three times before the route is over, either by wasting all my money on healing items or by returning through 8 thousand grass patches to a healing station AND BACK. Ugh.
