>>42931196Chris does a great job of describing this in his review for Sword and Shield in Eurogamer.
"The real problem with Pokémon Sword and Shield lies much deeper, or rather where that depth ought to be. There is far more than a whiff of troubled development to these games, brought about by an astonishing lack of complexity, texture, and flavour in almost every place where you'd usually find it in every Pokémon game that's come before."
"Pokémon Sword and Shield is entirely dungeonless. There is no route or cave or building or wood more complex than Red, Blue and Yellow's Viridian Forest, the tutorial pseudo-dungeon at the start of generation one. Nothing in the game comes close to even Mt. Moon or Rock Tunnel, let alone the twelve floors of warp-pad mayhem in Silph Co."
"Pokémon Sword and Shield's lack of substance is almost a parody. Time and time again some rumble or crash or moment of panic will happen out of shot, and you'll think - finally! - it's your call to action. But no."
"There are too many closed doors, too many unnecessarily eye-grabbing buildings in prime position left weirdly inaccessible or empty."
"Even the NPCs dotted around the world seem to have less to say. There's so little 'legend has it...' nothing by way of real explanation or construction of the world, at least until the final phases of the story."
"Pokémon Sword and Shield project a sense of scale and ambition far beyond any previous ones in the series, but to take it back to those gargantuan new Dynamax forms, the size is merely a shadow. A shallow projection, in place of the real thing."
