I played it for 6 hours so far, just took down the first Noble Pokemon and moved on to the second biome. The game feels like a breath of fresh air, but the gameplay loops becomes repetitive quite quickly. The visuals are underwhelming too, but what's more problematic to me is that the big open areas are pretty barren and empty, so far I haven't seen any cool landmarks, structures or other points of interest. I did stumble upon one cave, but that was just a hallway connected to a big room with nothing in it, except a few Machops and crystals to break for Tumblestones. Exploration doesn't seem very rewarding or meaningful at all, unless you like duking it out against higher-leveled wild Pokemon or collecting a ton of resources for crafting.
What also doesn't help is that Pokemon do not interact with each other at all, they just move around a bit and have 3 pre-programmed types of behavior towards the player character: they follow you for a bit, they run away from you or they get mad and start attacking you. Pokemon constantly running away from battles is really annoying when you need to complete battle-related tasks in order to fill up the research progress for those particular Pokemon. It is also kinda neat that you can trigger 1 vs 2 or 1 vs 3 battles, but that's pretty much it for interaction between different wild Pokemon.
I do enjoy the gameplay and really love the music, and I'm glad that GameFreak decided to do something new, but it's clear to me that the game needed quite a lot of extra dev time to make it truly special and groundbreaking. It's a good foundation for similar games in the feature, but I wish it was something more than just a good foundation.
Also, on a slightly unrelated note, playing this kinda makes me miss SMT V, that game actually felt satisfying to explore with larger areas brimming with demons, goodies and collectibles in every corner of the map.
