These games are fucking garbage, everybody who praises them must be nostalgic as fuck and remembering them with rose-tainted glasses. The only impressive thing about them is the 3D animations.
- The games are slow as shit, a single turn takes forever because every battle is a double battle and the animations are so long. It's slower than DP.
- Every battle being a double battle is not fun, a lot of the battle are just the usual "Use super-effective STAB move" but now it takes longer because double battle, long animations and every trainer having multiple pokemon (instead of having wild encounters against single pokemon).
- Level curve is worse than HGSS, nearly guaranteed to be underleveled at the end of the games.
- A few challenging battles, but most of it comes from trying to capture a Shadow Pokemon in a trainer battle while that pokemon tries to kill itself with Shadow Rush.
- The story is nothing amazing. I didn't mind it but nostalgiafags talk about it like it was so much better than regular Pokemon games. It isn't, nor does it widely change the formula. It's just your usual villain Team, except the whole game is just that without having the gyms and routes. Imagine Kanto but without the routes and gyms, you just fight the Team Rocket. That's the game.
- People say it's more "mature" or "dark" than regular Pokemon. It isn't. Yeah, you have "Shadow" Pokemon... it's not mature or dark, not even edgy, it just means they're being mind-controlled and in-game it boils down to a simple gameplay mechanic. The villains are not "dark", they're goofy as fuck. You've got a diva, a disco dancer, a group of colored Sentai who can't count how many of themselves they are... it's like a Saturday morning cartoon. Not saying it's bad, but saw a lot of people they the villains were "so much better" and "darker" than regular Pokemon. Ridiculous.
- Purification takes forever. Yeah, they "fixed it" in the sequel, but it's still too long.
- No good way to EV train and can't breed.