Mary Hope Martin

Look, I’ve played Pokémon for over 10+ years now and while I’m not an expert at video games, this is one of the few series I hold very dear to me. Sword and Shield is honestly one of my least favorites of all time. The pacing is so linear, it’s like drawing a straight line, there’s no exploration anymore. The wild area was a neat concept, but it fell a little flat and had constant communication bugs. The removal of the GTS floored me as I couldn’t get something as trivial as a plain sobble without having to go to fan created trade rooms to get one. The graphics are subpar for a switch title that flies with the Nintendo brand. The cut of the pokedex really hit the nail in the coffin for me and finding out that the animations haven’t been touched at all other than a new coat of polish? That was the worst. Animations are stiff and lazy, moving along the x and y axis for a move and that being it. Pokémon used to follow you, and while that changed for the dlc, why wasn’t it included in the base game? Or at least added for free? I bought the game off eBay for $40, about the same for a 3DS game, I couldn’t imagine spending $90 to play a console game with bare bones content. The NPCs act as filler and so many shortcuts were used instead of actually giving us a story. Camping was a neat addition and I did enjoy it, however it could make the game extremely unbalanced as it can give your Pokémon permanent buffs to sweep the competition effortlessly. Raid battles were extremely fun, but the formula needs to be adjusted as the fixed damage to shield ratio is quite annoying. The beginning of the game was pretty good, but it dragged me down so much as I continued that I stopped playing entirely. It’s honestly quite sad that this is the first mainline, console product from the highest grossest franchise in the world and it is this bad. It feels like a spit in the face to longtime fans. The cons outweigh the pros so much that I can’t recommend this game to anyone. Until the games improve or there’s a change in how Gamefreak handles this series, this will very likely be my last Pokémon game as I don’t want to support this path any further. Thank you, but no thank you.