>>49041794>What about it is well constructed?The entire region revolves around Mt. Coronet on the center, which is very good map design. You need to get through Mt. Coronet a few times during the story, each time allowing you to explore more of it. During the climax of the story, with all the HMs, you can finally get to the top. It's like a Metroidvania dungeon.
>Literally none of the routes are distinct except the snow ones (and not even in a good way) and none of them are particularly open either.Routes 205, 206, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215 and 224 are all very well designed and offer multiple paths for optional items. The snowy routes are also very distinct, although not great to explore because of the snow itself.
For comparison, Hoenn also has a similar number of great routes: 110, 111 (with the desert), 113, 114, 119, 120 and 11. All of the endgame routes are not that great though, since they're just water.
>I'd even argue Platinum even has worse facilities than XY because at least XY has triples and rotation battles, both of which are more distinct than whatever the fuck Battle Castle and Arcade are trying to do.Did you at least try to play these facilities? Battle Castle is the least intersting one, but it's still leagues better than the Battle Palace.
>What do you mean "obviously"? Plenty of DS games at least had a basic matchmaking system instead of forcing you to use friend codes.Game Freak was still learning how to implement these features. They peaked in gen 6 and then got worse and worse.
>Is it? I can't tell because it was piss easy like every other game.None of the gym leaders is easy, and there are quite a lot of tough bosses during the main game. Cynthia is the hardest champion to date, and the revamped elite four is also pretty hard. Mars, Jupiter and Fantina are also really hard, considering they have fully evolved Pokémon in the early game. Also, some of the random trainers can be very tough to deal with (the double battle on route 215)
