>>56269097on top of what
>>56269128 and the others said
He was also heavily hyped up as being pretty much the only really exclusive pokémon for each version (which of course proved to be false advertising, as literally everything was with SM and expecially USUM) it was The Pokémon shown in the intro, playign with the professor, and eventually his ace, got a special distribution later on to have that unique new form only available in USUM, and yadda yadda
*For context*
They promoted the game making it seem like this time there were real differences between the two versions, one was during the day, the other during the night, they showed different boss battles (totem pokèmon) and different cutscenes (that 2 second clip of tapu koko clashing with Buzzwhole/pheromosa) and Lycanrock was the only one promoted like a version exclusive by the fact that he will have a different evolution based not on the time of day but on the cardridge, so that he would be a really unique pokèmon (no other pokèmon does this even to this day)
But then...
Only the first totem battle (the one in the trailer) proved to be different (lmao), the cutscene with tapu koko and the ub was actually useless and meaningless, and while Rockruff could actually evolve only in the scripted version of lycanroc, both forms could actually be find in the wild, making his gimmick extremely useless if not straight tedious to deal with.
People nowadays probably don't even remember this, but this let down may have caused his status as a failmon, much like Zoroark since you literally couldn't use it, this guy had the opposite problem in which he suddenly felt like a completely and utterly common mon from the first routes
