Ben Salerno

Great if you don't care about story or exploration, and just want to get to the slow-paced rock paper scissors combat. S&S strips-out essentially all of the adventuring of a typical RPG to give you the most bare-bones Pokemon experience to date. No long dungeons, optional areas or side stories, just checking off boxes on a purely linear to-do list. Instead of going to different parts of the world to find the types of pokemon that would be endemic to those areas, there's just one central zone containing essentially every pokemon in the entire game, with all their vastly different types and biologies, just hanging out in a little homogeneous field without any rhyme or reason to any of it. Despite some of the new designs being fresh and good additions to the pantheon, the game itself just reeks of developer apathy.