Scott Hopkins

Short and bad trio of stories with the illusion of freedom and flexibility while not including a level scaling system all entangled around a clumsy "school curriculum" with a limited Pokedex, uninspired legendary (and just regular) Pokemon, the new battle gimmick of "terrastilization" which changes the types and adds a chandelier to the head of your Pokemon. Rough all around character designs, painfully long cutscenes and glitchy gameplay make for another partial effort for full payment. The team star grunts are not only generic but the leader fights are just fighting a car, the gym leader's teams are lackluster at best and the herba mystical storyline sounds great but are truely just a HM grind, the elite 4 are fun but you will only be able to fight the elite 4 and champion once. The "tournament" is a very lame way to further integrate the school. The "picnic" mechanics are dull and replace mainstays like the daycare and has become an excuse not to include features such as "following Pokemon" instead it's replaced by a boring auto battle mechanic which leaves EV's, connectivity, and bonding with your team on the table big time. Lack of character customization is nothing but a detriment to this very boring and underwhelming game. What's even more irritating is the trend of releasing games without pokemon home connectivity seem more like the norm than a unfortunate by product of being behind of the curve with the companies' own technology. The aesthetic and overall map design leaves much to be desired, in terms of cave systems and dungeons that were icons of the series with many routes not being able to be differentiated from, what's most inexplicable is how dull and boring they have made everything look and feel. Lack of ability to conjure anything inspired the Pokemon company has instead opted to hire a Digimon designer to make the legendary Pokemon a bicycle. If you care about this franchise I have bad news, it doesn't care about you. Long since gone are the games that made this series great, now stands a standard annual addition to the 2 other games released for the series over the past 16-24 months, arceus made us realize how amazing this kind of game could be while borrowing some mechanical similarities from monster hunter rise while not being able to complete a free roam sandbox. While adding boundless movesets and fun catching, travelling, and battling mechanics where the game was truely designed to be different. The second being the charming but imperfect remake of pearl and diamond which brought a fun, fresh and, clean translation from the DS classic which admittedly should have taken more from platinum and kept some more mechanics and features of the underground while keeping the pokemon species that can be caught in the underground but making national dex pokemon available much sooner and at lower levels to minimize the impact of the limited pre national dex pokemon. All in all I believe if you're going to buy a switch for Pokemon games buy the mystery dungeon remake. If you're looking for a mainline game you are better off getting a Nintendo 3DS XL and enjoying the DS gen 4 and 5 classics as well as the gen 6-8 3ds versions and of course the ruby and sapphire remakes for any gen 3 fans while still being able to get digital versions of each and every gen 1 and 2 games. The switch pokemon games have been nothing but a huge disappointment and have missed opportunity to make something truely special but instead has failed to make something even entertaining time and time again.