Custardapple Cat

This is the first time I’ve ever experienced buyer’s remorse with a Pokémon game. I started playing this game with low expectations, but I was floored by how bland it was. It did a lot of things right, the towns all looked amazing, the music was pretty good, the gym challenges were fun, and the npc dialog was very funny at times, but the cons outweigh the pros. The game was short, and I mean short. It took me 15 hours to beat the main story, and that’s because I was shiny hunting in the middle of the game. The format for most of the game was this: you beat a gym, you go down a route, some story line happens, you keep going, and then and then you beat the next gym, lather, rinse, repeat. Usually Pokémon games are short, but this made the storyline in X and Y look like the odyssey. I usually don’t pay much attention to the visuals in a game but there were more visual glitches than I’ve ever seen in a 3D Pokémon game. A wild Natu used wish and the on screen hail effect inverted, with the hail floated upwards for about half a second. Overworld Pokémon would constantly bug out, and some Dynamax Pokémon clip into the ground. It was not the normal quality I was expecting. There is no postgame, you can catch the box art legendary and that’s it. You have the obligatory battle for BP facility, but all 3D pokemon games have those, and there’s not much to do there other than battle the same npcs over and over again. Usually Pokémon games have no postgame, but at this point in the series there should be something. The wild area was fun, but repetitive. I never felt like I was entering new biomes or anything, it was either sand or grass, nothing else. And the weather never made sense in the wild area, like, why is it hailing in a desert? But my biggest complaint is the story, or lack there of. The storyline was a joke, it was easily the worst storyline I’ve ever seen in a Pokémon game. It was so bad that professors Magnolia *literally* had to explain the whole story to you after you beat the game. All the important plot elements happened off screen: you’d hear a loud noise and when you start to approach it either Leon or Sonia would stop you and essentially say ‘let the adults handle this, go back to your gym challenge’. It was so bad. This has been the worst experience I’ve ever had with a Pokémon game, and if the series keeps going in this direction, this might be the last experience I ever have with a Pokémon game. Tldr: not worth $60.