>>58451010I don't think the city is too small, if anything I think it's probably a little too big, there's a lot of dead space. Once you've hit the rooftops and gotten whatever Pokemon spawn there, you won't need to ever go back to huge chunks of the city. But it feels pretty natural, there's a nice variety of waterways and green spaces. It's pretty nice to just walk around.
As for the battling, I like it a lot. There's no shortage of jank for sure but this feels like a true innovation compared to PLA. This is definitely something that should be pursued further and refined, because it works pretty well. It inevitably devolves into you shitstomping your opponent but that was the case for the rest of the series too, so I don't really hold that against it. Only real complaint is that you rely on moving your trainer to also move your Pokemon, which feels pretty sloppy. If you're gonna make positioning that important then you might as well let me control the Pokemon directly, at least during trainer battles when the player doesn't have to worry about getting hit.
One thing I haven't really seen anyone mention is how this game nails field moves, this is the best version of this idea the series has ever had, by far. If there's one thing that is taken from this game and built on in later games, I hope it's this. They could've gone even further, requiring ice moves to make bridges across water and grass moves to make bridges across rooftops, but this is a great foundation for what should be how all field moves work going forward.
