>>56380870The more homely, worldly art and world direction would be the obvious first point, but I'm sure everyone on this board has discussed it to death so I will just move on from that
In terms of game design, it does an amount of things well. The pokemon distribution and level curve are fair, dungeons being proper dungeons with lots of branching and light puzzles, routes have some complexity and make a game out of avoiding trainers or not, you're given a high amount of freedom in how you choose to approach the game with most gyms being able to be done out of order, legendaries get their own full optional dungeons barring moltres which adds a lot to the "legendary" feel of them, the safari zone plays perfectly into the goal of completing the pokedex and lets them more naturally add pokemon that are otherwise odd or don't "fit" in the region, as does the game corner and various trade-only pokemon, which also increases their rarity cool factor of those more limited pokemon, though bag space is unpleasant it does have something of a purpose in limiting the amount of helpful items you can carry around at a time which is something especially SV struggles with, the "story" structure is simple but solid and seamlessly connects back into the main goal of becoming the champion, HMs are used modestly but importantly, abundance of poison types means you're fighting a lot with status and you'll be weakened traveling down the road
Of course it also did its job to establish every staple of the series
Naturally it has its flaws like psychic balancing being wack, but in general it feels like they had a clear idea of what they were going for and did just that to the best of their ability
