Pokemon Sword and Shield are the first mainline releases for the series on home consoles, yet they failed to do anything meaningful with that opportunity. The locales are flashy and Pokemon look better than ever before, but other than polygon count, there are no ideas on display that previous hardware couldn’t have at least demonstrated. The decision to cull the Pokedex in order to future proof the series (I seem to remember that being the reasoning, don’t know, don’t really care) is head scratching and definitely disappointing.

There really isn’t too much more to say about these titles. In general, they’re lackluster and certainly not worth going back to buy if you missed them.