I'm a bit torn on this one.

On one hand, this is my favorite Pokémon game in a decade. In terms of structure, it's exactly what I've wanted from the series since it went to 3D. Exploring a region and raising my Pokémon at my own pace is a lot of fun! I do kind of wish that the Gyms scaled with your badges, but it doesn't bother me that much. I like a lot of the new Pokémon, Tinkaton is by far the standout and is rapidly becoming one of my all-time favorites. I thought the characters had a lot of personality and were written well, and I found the story to be pretty good. Arven and Penny's stories especially were very effective, I was emotionally invested in helping them out, which is more than I can say for most Pokémon stories, especially compared to the bland and forgettable characters and story of SwSh. Probably my third favorite overall in terms of story, behind BW and SuMo. The music was fantastic, particularly the Team Star battle theme and the Area Zero music. Terastalizing is my new favorite of the 3D Generational "gimmick", since it's a bit more strategic (and much less pandering) than Megas or Dynamaxing. Overall, I'd say it's a massive step up from Sword and Shield in basically every way, though I cannot comment on its improvements from Legends Arceus as I skipped that one (which from what I've seen and heard, was a mistake on my part).

But on the other hand, by god this is the single most unpolished Pokémon game. The frame rate is incredibly inconsistent, to the point where I was worried the game had crashed because it had dropped to single digits. The draw distance is laughably small, which when paired with some incredibly small Pokémon models leads to numerous unwanted encounters with Pokémon I couldn't even see, in addition to shadows manifesting five feet in front of me. There's a lot of Texture Warping, something I was under the impression died off during the PS1 days but apparently not. Pokémon can spawn in walls (and clip through them to start encounters with you). Shadows disappear and reappear depending on the camera angle. And most annoyingly of all, the game can crash. Now I'm lucky, I only had the game crash around 4 or 5 times, but that's still unacceptable. I've never had a Pokémon game crash on me before, out of the thousands of hours I've poured into this series. It's disappointing to see it like this.

I will again stress that the game is a lot of fun, and I sincerely hope patches fix it more so I can rate it higher. I really did love this game, it basically rekindled my love for mainline Pokémon that had been all but killed off with the sheer mediocrity of everything Post-B2W2, especially XY and SwSh.

Reviewed on Dec 28, 2022


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