The last Pokemon games I played through from start to finish were X and Y, so going in, the controversy around Sword and Shield almost put me off giving them an honest try.

I'm really pleased I did, typing this as the credits roll!

The new QOL features, gym challenges and region all feel great for the new generation; not ground breaking by any means, but definitely an improvement.

The story is serviceable, and has enough of that Pokemon charm to keep you moving between towns to see what comes next.

On the subject of the Pokemon themselves... There's plenty to catch! The current number in the dex (pre expansion) feels tight and gives plenty of creatures to hunt for, without dragging things out.

Overall, definitely an evolution, rather than a revolution, but amazing nonetheless!

I thought I would hate this one for the lack of the national dex, but it's not too bad, there's plenty of new content that makes it more fun. I really like the wild area, and dynamax is an interesting compromise between mega Pokemon and Z moves. I mean, I don't think Z moves have a place in Pokemon to begin with, and would much rather have had megas come back, but oh well. Max raids get old, but I appreciate them for making good IVs and hidden abilities easier to get, even if you have to use exploits. I'm excited for what the expansions will bring.

I don't think this set is the death knell of the franchise, nor do I believe that the franchise is going downhill overall. The optimist in me says that this was a test of building on new hardware while keeping quality as high as it can for what they intended when they made this game.

I do have gripes with the game -- I think the Gigantamax stuff isn't very fun (especially with some of the terrible AI you can get stuck with), and the initial lack of a GTS for people that wanted to trade mons without using Wonder Trade is a bit frustrating.

The worst offense this game commits is that it simply lacks a solid amount of postgame content -- something that up through X/Y, players had grown quite used to. It seems like from Sun/Moon going forward, content has dwindled and in the case of Sword/Shield, it's a ~90 minute fetch quest more or less.

I'm hopeful that future iterations open up more possibilities and introduce some fun potentials -- I'm looking forward to the day we can do a REAL gym build/customization to invite other players to tackle. It might be wishful thinking, but given TPC's desire to try different things each gen, I'll stay hopeful.

Mediocre y conformista, no aprovechan para nada el poder que les ofrece la switch.
Me agrado el arte del juego, pero no se pueden ignorar esos dientes de sierra, que solo desaparecen en las cinematicas.
Y el mayor insulto de todos es el mapa, es un mapa comun de cualquier pokemon, con sus rutas y pueblos, pero le añaden un gran terreno, que esta divido en varios climas (No vaya ser que el jugador se asuste de ir a un lado a otro, aunque tengan la conveniente funcion de taxis voladores).
Supongo que para alguien que es fan de pokemon es suficiente...

I never realized how important the story in a Pokémon game could be until I played this game.

Pokémon DPP or BW both had stories that reeled like they mattered, they had a purpose and felt urgent and important. While I appreciate the return to basics with the character's goal being to simply beat all the gyms, that's not the whole equation.

The sudden addition of Eternatus felt forced and nonsensical. If he was the main legendary Pokémon of the game rather than the uninteresting Shield and Sword wolf we got, and/or was the main focus from the start, this wouldn't have been an issue. You fight this world-ending Pokémon a mere ten minutes after you hear about him, making his inclusion not only feel unimportant, but forced and poorly paced.

The characters in this game are also incredibly uninteresting, most of them being either exact copies of earlier characters, or in the case of your rival, his only purpose is to be knocked down over and over.

The gyms all being themed like some sort of sports-stadium, while a nice way to show the importance of gyms, makes all of them feel the same, and not as interesting or solely themed around one type like the Pokémon games before.

The design of more than half of the new Pokémon look either okay, uninteresting, or noticeably terrible, and the fact that only 1/4 of all Pokémon could even be added to this game really didn't help it. Throughout my entire play through of this game I was constantly telling myself, "this just doesn't look like a real Pokémon." Not to mention the new Gigantimax inclusion, which just feels like Mega-Evolutions, except worse designed.

The graphics looked noticeably terrible, especially when compared to other Switch games, and the soundtrack is forgettable.

The only things I can think of that this game did right is the models for characters and Pokémon, and being able to see Pokémon in the wild, rather than running into a random encounter from a bush.

Pokémon Shield may have been the Pokémon game straw to break my back of tolerance for mediocrity. I grew up loving the first three generations of Pokémon, and I really enjoyed my time with the games through X and Y, but rather than launching forward on the Switch, Pokémon Shield marked a clear backslide for the franchise.

After completing the fifth gym, I resigned myself to simply “getting through” this game. The story was more forgettable than usual—Team Yell is more of a joke than an actual enemy, and the towns made great first impressions only to be unmasked at empty shells as I walked into the seventh “painted door” in each one... The story never made me explore the cities the way Blue/Red and Gold/Silver did, and it often felt like that was true only because GameFreak couldn’t fill the cities with unique substance in the 3D engine.

The biggest problem I realized while playing this game, however, is that Pokémon has now reached that troubling point in every franchise where it no longer motivates the player within the game, but counts on the player’s compulsions from previous entries in the franchise... My team was set after the third gym and did not change except for one Pokémon in the late game. I never felt like it was necessary to explore the Wild Area, and I completely forgot it even existed during the grind of badges 4-“8.” This game was more Pokémon for everyone who wanted more, but for someone looking to be revitalized in my love for the franchise, this fell completely flat. I’m sad to have reached this point, but I sure am glad this particular journey is over.

The latest Pokémon games use the same assets for all two of their dungeons. Galar Coal Mine and Galar Coal Mine 2. At the point in the story where it's time to go face the bad guy (for reasons unknown to even the writers) you walk up to this huge building and think, "oh, this must be a decently sized dungeon like Silph Co. or something." then you just. ride an ELEVATOR for a bit. And that's it.

I think it's approach to dungeons that I just described should give you a feel for how Gamefreak has handled literally every other aspect of the game. That is to say, poorly, or not at all.

I hope you don't like exploring! There's fucking none of that here. I can count the number of areas that actually require or even have OPTIONAL exploration in them on one hand. Optional content, for that matter, seems to be a thing of the forgotten past. You'll see everything there is to see in this tiny region by the time you beat the last gym in your 15-20 hour playthrough. Once you beat the game you can go catch the legendary - yeah, remember when that was just a part of the game on top of a lot of post game content in generations past? - and there you have it! I hope you like hatching eggs and doing the worst iteration of the battle facility of all time. Because there is NOTHING ELSE.

So like I said Galar is pretty small. The region is a straight line from your home to a train, where the train delivers you to the rest of the region, two loops connected by the wild area. Each town is tiny outside of two or three, and there's a single interior home that is literally copied and pasted for each and every home in the region, just with different NPCs inside. Infamously there is the town that is just a literal alleyway and a Pokémon center.

Side note: That town houses the gym leader that does lip flaps into a microphone with nothing coming out. I don't care that there is no voice acting but why on earth would you call attention to it with such an awkward cutscene?

Each town houses a gym - there are no more towns that are just there to build the world or house optional content, of course. Some gyms are fine. Some gyms just have you literally fight a few trainers in a row (not even giving you a physical space to explore or solve puzzles) then give you the gym leader. These gym leaders are braindead easy.

Braindead easy is the name of the game here, really. That's one thing that can't be attributed to the impossible Pokémon release cycle imposed by The Pokémon Company. That is instead all on Junichi Masuda's incredibly misguided ideas on game design. (He believes that since everyone has a phone he must make his games short and easy so that people will play them. I'm not going to even bother criticizing that because it is so obviously stupid to everyone in the entire world.)

The story is bad too, if you can imagine that. It stops you all the time to shove the NONEXISTENT story down your throat. Hop stops you constantly to say stupid annoying garbage. It is a huge detriment to the game that you can not do anything for long without being stopped by someone to get a bunch of terrible dialogue. It's not even like Sun and Moon that actually had a good story so that it was somewhat excusable. Hop is... annoying. Leon is annoying. Sonia is fine? Marnie is fine? The villains and their motivations are completely incomprehensible though. I literally just didn't know what was happening at one point, when you have to go talk to random people to find the bad people that had replaced the good people or something by one of the villains. Then later that villain isn't actually bad? Or something? I don't really know. It is amazingly incomprehensible and unfinished. The story is about climate change I guess? But the message is so muddy that you can probably read whatever you want into it.

So like, basically everything about this game is bad. What purpose does this serve? Who is this game for? Are there people who liked this? I think this must be what a film critic feels like when audiences fawn over a terrible popcorn movie. I guess this game might be cool if you've never played a video game before. Or if you were born in the Stone Age I bet it's really cool. I kid. But only a little bit.

I guess most of the people who loved this game are casual gamers. That's fine. But if you're at all invested in video games as a medium I don't think there is anything of value here.

No more Pokémon. Society has progressed past the need for Pokémon.