Devin Brown

People tend to write about how they feel about the game but not about the objectivity of it. People forget that the performance of a game is part of the gameplay. Consumers spend more than half of a hundred dollars on games to get their money worth so by principle they should have a fleshed out game instead we receive a poorly optimized game which makes enjoying the game difficult. Let's talk about the game itself: Graphics: Game Freak has a history of poor optimization and tend to third party out software engineers due to their poor ability to make use of the console's hardware. (Fire Red/Leaf Green along eith Sword and Shield being other examples where they needed help condensing all the content due to failed porting). The graphics in this game competing with other Open World games recently released is no where close. Their previous title Arceus was fleshed out more cleanly with rarely reported texture issues and most of that was with the grass. Gameplay: The gameplay is entertaining and overall more multiplayer friendly. The issue here is that due to glitches strange occurrences which interfere with the gaming experience occur for example: falling through the floor while battling, Pokeballs disappearing while catching, poorly optimized camera angles leading to targeting or catching Pokemon unwanted, frame rate drops that causes freezing, frequent game crashes, and no back up data support. Let's not even get into the raids because doing any raid above rank 3 has a series of problems which lead to raid losses, disconnection, and even penalties for being disconnected due to the game crashing. The fans tend to ignore these issues due to Pokemon being a childhood favorite and is a great fallback game to simpler times and that is perfectly fine, however Game freak needs to be held accountable for their pattern of rushed products with consistent flaws. Summary: Once againGame Freak misses the mark with an open world Pokemon game because of their lack of willingness to take the time to test their game. I apologize to anyone on the development team because I am sure they didn't want to release such a game. The map isn't even comparable to most open-zone games and scale to about the same size if not smaller than a map on Arceus. Game Freak discontinued fun mechanics introducd in Arceus like stat based combat where the amount of attacks are based on the Pokemon's speed, Pokemon engagement behaviors such as: attacking the trainer, observing the trainer, or wanting to befriend the trainer without battling, feeding the wild Pokemon, and so much more that was taken out. Recommendation: If you like Pokemon, I wouldn't buy this game for 65 dollars. I'd wait for it or trade in a bunch of games to get it for cheaper because they are cheating anyone who buys this for 65 dollars.