One step forward and two steps back:
I've been playing Pokemon for 24 years, and look forward to developing a strong party, finding fun puzzles, and beating gyms and the bad guys. For frame rate and graphics - I'd be happy with a game that looks like pokemon red from 1995 so long as the puzzles, characters and world is interesting. This game didn't deliver on the key aspects that make this series great. Hope developers remember before the next gen.
The bad:
- The gyms - What happened to the gym puzzles? This game had errands to run instead of fun challenges, and battling was minimised.
- The open world felt empty and that I could explore most of it without needing to unlock HM's, so felt a lack of challenge or needing to think.
- for story, there were dialogue sections were slowly drawn out for 10+ minute periods with many moments thinking oh goodie, yet another character that I need to talk to that I don't care about, let's smash the A button until they leave and I can go back to filling my pokedex. The pacing was almost as bad as sun/moon.
- further on from the story, I can't help but think about beating the bad guys in team rocket, defend the world from floods/droughts/time and space, and can anybody find me some rival that I want to beat?
- crafting - this was a missed opportunity. They failed to continue on the awesome success of arceus.
The good
- Story - dull for the first 90% of gameplay, but then after beating the elite four, characters suddenly had meaning and the plot became interesting. Wish this could have been interesting for more than just the final 10%.
- complexity of starters. So I started with fire, and found later that it had ghost, and my rival's grass also had dark to combat me - this added complexity was cool and I had to think and be a little careful. Nicework, well done there.
for open world versus linear, I felt the game lost it's traditional focus on story telling and sometimes challenges of how to get around puzzles. A nice concept to go where I want when I want. But for me, this was one step forward and two steps back.