It was released in a horrendous state in terms of performance and glitches, and graphics (and cutscenes) at times. Nothing consistently game breaking, but still unacceptable for what should be a AAA release (after all, they charge the full price for it).

The map certainly is big and open and I am sure it took a while to make. And occasionally, there are some neat landmarks, a bunch of platforming and certainly a good variety of Pokémon to find. But outside of that, the world is fairly barren, with very little to do, a whole lot of same-y static NPCs and almost no points of interest apart from the same few building blocks over and over again, at most.

You essentially got raids, picnic, photo mode and shiny hunting, and that's pretty much it, unless you really enjoy the gym mini games...oh, and the academy content, which imo is rather dry for the most part.

No Battle Facility, not even a simple Battle Tower anymore.

The Team Star bases are boring, uninspired areas with equally uninspired brain-dead gameplay, except for the boss battles.

The Titan battles are worse versions of Gen 7's totem battles.

The Champion storyline lacks a Victory Road again, and unique rooms for the Elite 4 and overall feels rather...basic, certainly not much more than in most other main line games.

The towns are absolutely empty in terms of content, with almost nothing to do there.

Once again, the exp share is forced on the player, and now they even took away the animation and set/switch toggle.

The whole game feels like the bare skeleton of a main line game set in an open world (which can lead to a messed-up game balance).

The story is definitely above average for a Pokémon main line game, but that's not a high bar. The new Pokémon models, textures and behavior is definitely a very welcome change and the Pokémon variety is great.

Quality of life features make the experience super convenient for players (arguably too convenient, but that's debatable).