Chris Davis

This was the first Pokemon game I put down after starting it. I'm back to it and will finish it, but that effort only comes from completing every other Pokemon game since the start. Usually, I devour main series instalments. The graphics, for 2023, aren't cool. Despite many new quality-of-life features, a great soundtrack and genuinely compelling stories, the graphics are truly unforgivable at this price point. My main issue (I'll keep it to one) is probably the size of the open-world areas to the size of cities and towns. The cities especially are too large with entire streets lacking interactions. It also seems quite lazy to add 5 of the same restaurant within nearly visibly distance of each other. The open world suffers the same fate, only worsened by the poorly rendered background of motionless clouds and choppy 8-bit lookin' windmills. It's weird that the last two Pokemon games didn't suffer this same fate in their town designs. The game's successes are nearly always shaded by its lacklustre graphics or bugs you can't look away from. At multiple times, I felt some graphic elements (metal dams, castle walls and some pools) were comparable to N64 Majora's Mask. It's also quite frustrating because, outside of an underwhelming over world, Arceus didn't suffer such poor performance issues. Hopefully, they will get it right with Gen 10.