PokéRogue is, in my opinion, very much too ambitious for its own good. It's an insane endeavor, for a browser game, to do all that it does (and indeed, even just on a mechanical level, a lot of abilities and moves are still not implemented, though obviously that will pass with time), and at a base level, it does it pretty well. Along the way to the final boss, you'll fight a bunch of wild pokemon trainers, gym leaders, E4+Champion and a rival, and after every fight you get a random item. It adapts Pokémon to a roguelite formula fantastically well- the more Pokémon you get, the more eggs you hatch, the more options you unlock. And on the other hand, every run is different, because while you will eventually start with your absolute best aces, you'll have to fill up the rest of the team with whatever else you run into (probably something like a Gyarados and an Ursaluna, if you're like me).

That is all well and good, but where it falls apart is just how much stuff there is. Mainline Pokémon has over 1000 critters now, 900+ moves and 300+ abilities- that is all just way too much for one game to feature. This isn't about Dexit, there's never been a Pokémon game where more than like, 150-200 Pokémon are available to catch before the credits roll, and I might still be highballing that number. And those games are some 20 hours long if you're rushing, PokéRogue is only... well it's like, 3 hours long, but we'll get to the length in a second. My point is, this is just too much. The sheer number of options means they cannot possibly be balanced at all, which paradoxically makes the game feel more repetitive because why the hell would I use most Pokémon when I could use much more versatile and minmaxed equivalents? A Pidgeot is never going to hold a candle to a Staraptor, and why would I ever use a Donphan when I have access to Great Tusk for just a few points more? Worse than that, only a few select strategies are really viable. By the late game every boss 'mon is going to be holding a few Lum Berries, which is going to make status effect-based strategies fare pretty poorly. On the other hand, stat boosts last until you enter a trainer battle, so anything that can do those well is automatically high tier (You can't take those buffs into Gym Leader fights, but you can against boss wild Pokémon. Plus, with the somewhat janky AI, you can definitely find some opportunities to set up a sweep). Also, the final boss and the Rival's ace are always the same, so you'll really want to build around them by the end. Starting with anything other than the "ol' reliables" you'll inevitably get a few of quickly begins to feel like a self-imposed challenge, and with how incredibly fucking long the game is, that's just not appealing.

Length, in fact, is in my opinion PokéRogue's biggest flaw. When I said the game took about three hours to beat, I was not kidding, runs go between 3 and 4 hours which is just nuts for a game that's mostly going to be you clicking the same move on a wild Pokémon 20 levels weaker than yours. It just doesn't need to be like that, too. You can get up to level 200 compared to the official games' cap at 100, but learn-sets still go up to 100 so the latter half of your journey will be a lot more samey (unless you replace some of your Pokémon, but it's not like the new ones will be learning anything new on their own too), and so much of any playthrough is just fighting wild Pokémon that it's really easy to see how a lot of that could be cut off. Make every 10th floor from 10 to 80 be a gym leader fight, 80-90 is the E4 and 90-100 is the finale, and you've cut off the runtime in half and the amount of actual content seen by like, 5%. The difficulty might feel better, too- a lot of the game is trivial, but you're eventually going to hit a brick wall that just sweeps you and have to restart from scratch (or just reload your browser page and start the fight over...). I just don't understand why this free game feels the need to have so much padding, there's even an infinite mode for those who do want the game to go on longer, but at least for me it does ruin a lot of the fun- it's incredibly addictive, so it's common for me to want to start a run, but I know that halfway through I'll be absent-mindedly clicking Waterfall after setting up a few Dragon Dances with my Gyarados, while watching a Youtube video. So I dunno, extremely impressive effort, but I do feel the result is only kind of ok.