This game shouldn't have been 60 bucks. It did not earn that price tag. It is a mediocre as fuck mess that made a fuckton of excuses for exclusion of people's favorite Pokemon, resulting in one of the largest fandom debates of all time. It made me hate Charizard, and almost made me completely hate this franchise as a whole. This is one of the few games that almost made me cry for all of the wrong reasons. Fuck this game, and fuck what it represents. Fans deserve better.

Also real nice adding an additional 30 dollars just for DLC, I'm sure putting salt on the wound will heal it up real good asshole.

Edit: Having beaten the game within the past few days, my opinion hasn't really changed. I'm not so much angry at the game itself as much as I am the decisions made while making it. The game is a mediocre mess that has little to nothing going for it, but there are worse entries in the series. The DLC thing is still BS though.

Edit No. 2:
This is still what I would consider the second worst game in the series, but as you'll see by the change of status, I have gone to Master this game. Firstly I want to say thanks to a close friend of mine for getting me into Competitive Pokemon. If it weren't for them I would not have gotten to Max Rank in Ranked Mode and would not have sunk as many hours into this game as I did. As a competitive game, SwSh is pretty damn good minus the previous season which allowed Cover Legendaries into Competitive, one of the worst executive decisions ever made in my opinion because it resulted in a fuck ton of people just using Zacian constantly. The way Ranked operates is genuinely pretty damn good, with losing not being incredibly punishing as you get placed into new tiers throughout the season, sticking to the highest tier you've attained until the season ends in which your rank is reset.

Now don't get me wrong, Ranked is far from perfect. The amount of people who use legendary Pokemon is obscenely high, and it is almost always the same 2 or 3 that you'll encounter, but outside of the individuals like that battles can genuinely be fun.

This review will still have its low rating due to everything that built up to this game's release, as well as the base game's general mediocrity, but there are things in this game that are worthwhile, I just hope that they'll be put into a good game next time and not... this.

Earlier last year I marathoned all three of the mainline Dark Souls games. I started with 2, as that was the first one I owned, moved to 1, and finally went to 3. 3 is by far the weakest entry in the series. It relies way too much on 1 for its lore and narrative, the level design is either overly large and too spread out or overly narrow and tight with very few inbetweens. Areas feel like they take forever to get through, and it has the single worst poison swamp area in all three of the mainline games in Farron Keep.

Even then, that's not my biggest gripe with this game. No, my biggest gripe is the combat. It's too fast paced, to the point where it doesn't feel like Dark Souls anymore. Here's the thing, Dark Souls 1 had the perfect amount of speed for the combat. It wasn't slow as a turtle, but it also wasn't full out Bleach (Tite Kubo be damned). It felt like the kind of combat you would experience in a fantasy world, slow enough for there to be strategy and fast enough for there to be urgency. Then DS2 showed up and made things ridiculously slow to the point of pure annoyance. So, what was the proper response of DS3? To try and be Bloodborne.

Now, I understand that BB is a Souls game, I get it. But that game is built around its speed, with things like the parry system being long ranged. DS3 does not have this, and that is its fatal flaw for me. It tries to be BB and Dark Souls without understanding what makes either of those games work. I'm sorry Miyazaki, but this shit just isn't cutting it for me. I only ranked it lower than 2 because it was the only Dark Souls game to make me genuinely feel like I had to grind for once, something which I only did out of desire in the previous two games.

Dark Souls 3 is a good video game, but for me, it is the worst Dark Souls game.