Ian R-J

I’m going to be straight here: it’s an unfinished and rushed game that could’ve been the best had the team not obviously left out a mountain of content. I comfortably beat this game in 25 hours and that’s the quickest of any gen. I beat all the titans, beat the gyms and elite 4, beat team star, and did a whole lot of raids. The frames range from 10-25 per second, and not a frame more. Not a huge deal, but still really sucks. Titans and raids are the highlight, raids function similar to before (maybe a bit worse with the performance lag shortening the time a bit). Titans had the coolest story with Arven, that is never matched anywhere else in the base game. Now for the bad, the map is large and fun to explore, but lacks any real PoI outside what is marked, no side quests of any kind and caves are not as amazing as they could have been. The large map is still fun to explore, but could’ve had more substance to them. The worst part of this game by far are the gyms, the core part of these games have been reduced to poorly made trials with few trainer battles outside the gym, there are no more gyms to traverse. The cities they reside in are even worse, they’re hollow shells with nothing in them except pokemarts, NPCs are rarely able to talk to you, and when they do they have nothing to say or give you. The era of spending a good hour or two exploring every part of a city is dead here. If they only put in features from old games that make Pokémon what it is, I would give to is a 10/10 in a heartbeat, but in the state it’s in now I cannot in good faith recommend anyone waste money on a rushed template for a Pokémon game. Story could’ve been done better had they flowed from one PoI to another, but I don’t think many people who worked on this game had much experience in story writing.