Savion Vangilder

Game has a lot of charm and is very creative. I think it was a really good deviation from the original formula. It's fun as hell play and worth a buy for someone who's been playing since gen 4. However I do feel like for a game that has such a large open world they didn't really make an effort to fill it out. Most towns are set peices for gym battles rather than fully flushed out towns with multiple interiors and activities and characters to talk to. The world is large and diverse but rather than fill it with characters and locations to explore in depth most of it was left relatively empty and they just littered the map with items to pick up to encourage exploration rather than putting things into the map the genuinely makes you want to explore. Also the Pokemon designs for the most part feel uninspired. Some designs are almost a perfect copy and paste to other Pokemon and the ones that are more original lack a clear vision I'm their design. It felt like they just came up with a bunch of random designs overnight without putting much thought into the creatures they were creating. There were a few exceptions but for the most part these problems felt consistent. If you already love the Pokemon formula these things can be overlooked at face value but if your someone who was looking for a deep and flushed out open world Pokemon game to the extend of a Bethesda or CD projekt red game then you'll probably be disappointed. Performance and graphics can also be an issue from time to time but if you can look past that an the few other issues I listed the game is pretty solid. I don't regret buying it at full price I just wish they would have spent as much time on there adding dungeons and interiors as much as they did on focusing on the charm of the game. However I think I'd rather have a game that's feels charming and alive than a game that feels dead but has plenty of repetitive side activities(like Arceus although that was a solid game).