Shane Beranek

This game is a complete mess of cut content and terrible performance. While most people have spoken up recently about how bad the game runs let me say what I find to be the worst parts about this game in what they have removed from previous titles and horrible design choices that ruin player experience. In sword and shield they change the post game battle facility, a massive staple in Pokémon games ever since the battle frontier, to be a tower that goes up to 7 battles and quits with no restrictions on legendaries and removal of the ability to play with friends and family, making the battle tower lose any enjoyment it had. There “fix” to this was to remove the battle facility all together so now no one can enjoy it. Online single battles are still limited to a 20 minute timer that goes down during animation but this time they also forced a 7 minute personal timer to both players. Considering most professional 6v6 battles could last up to 20-50 minutes depending on the skill level of the player, this makes full on single battles impossible to actually play. The game is a graphical nightmare that does not live up to modern day graphics and performance and hardly lives up to the standards of games made 10 years ago. I’ve been apart of global game jam games made from scratch in 48 hours with better looking art than this game made by a team of paid professionals with years of experience Exp share still has no way to turn off. For those who say that is a good thing let me remind you that removing an optional feature is almost always never a good thing. What this does to the game is cause your party to have horrible EV spreads and level adjustments that completely ruin the game. They could have easily scaled the games levels to accommodate for exp share and then added the off switch. What reason could they possibly have to remove an off button. That’s not even to mention all the extra cuts and bad decisions they’ve made such as removal of set mode which partially undermines some hardcore nuzlocks and challenge runs, the removal of saying no to battle animations dragging out many parts of the post game and in game for players who don’t want to see the same poorly animated attack 100 times over, adding a ribbon that can only be obtained by trading away your Pokémon which undermines ribbon collectors who can’t get it on their ribbon masters without giving away they year long projects. Overall comparatively to what you could get for $60 and what existed in the past these games are jokes that insult the intelligence of the kids and the modern Pokémon player, and have cut out all the soul of what was once Pokémon and have left nothing but a husk of its former self for what will be over double the price when they add the dlc to make the game almost on par with previous titles released day one 2/10