Playing Shield for the first time and just beat gym 5, and I honestly think it’s pretty boring. I like the aesthetics and designs of the towns but there’s nothing to do in them, Hammerlocke looks like a cool giant castle but in practice is just a straight line with the cafe, boutique, pokemon center and train station along it, Ballonlea is so pretty and I like the concept… but there’s literally nothing in it except for the gym and that one house where you deliver the ghost girl’s letter to, it felt like a massive waste of such a cool looking town…
Hop is boring and I keep calling him Hau by mistake, Team Yell only exists to roadblock paths I’m not meant to take, I’ve only seen Marnie for like one minute and no clue why she’s apparently popular, and Bede felt like a generic asshole rival except apparently I don’t see him again until the end after Opal took him away to groom him? That’s anticlimactic as hell.
And it feels like the main story is just a roadblock getting in the way of properly exploring the Isle of Armor and the Crown Tundra, I’ve spent more time in the DLC areas than in the actual main game areas even though I can’t actually catch anything in the Tundra for some stupid reason and I’m especially bothered by being outright stopped from trying to catch Calyrex after following its storyline through to the end because I’m not Champion yet