Pros:
+The story is pretty good, albeit short.
+Each move has its own level, meaning that if you level up flamethrower on one mon, every other mon who gets flamethrower will have the powered up version. It's a great quality of life thing.
+The post game is huge. It's almost like the main story is just a tutorial for the larger, but less narrative-driven post-game.
+Having Pokémon as actual characters is fun.
+The constant rewards you get from completing missions makes it so easy for that "just one more dungeon" feeling.
+The water colour aesthetic is pretty nice.
Cons:
-The power of moves and accuracy only shows up as a bar instead of as numbers in the main game, making it kind of hard to compare.
-You can’t filter Pokémon by rare quality, so if you want to find a specific one, good luck searching through the entire list.
-Shiny Pokémon are locked to “Strong” Pokémon, meaning about 20 in total. It's a pretty weird decision that ruins the surprise of finding random shinies.
-Since you can only control the three main teammates, if any of your recruits gets attacked at the back of the group, you have literally no way to get to them to save them. There's not even a tactics option where you can send a main teammate to stay at the rear of a group for such situations. It's incredibly frustrating to constantly get interrupted every step because your Pidgey at the back is being attacked every turn and you can't do anything about it.
-Moves are unbalanced as fuck. Multi-hit moves and room-wide moves are basically the only viable ones in the endgame. Moves with only one tile are borderline useless, making a large section of the mons useless.
-You can only recruit wild Pokémon if the player kills enemy. So you can deal 199/200 damage, but if your teammate Weedle does that last 1hp you won't get a chance to recruit.
-The item inventory stops expanding after a certain rank (until the very last rank, which is a huge grind). Considering it's the most important rank-up reward, having it be stagnant for like 70% of ranks is annoying.
-If your current party is full, you can't just send recruited mons to camp. You have to choose between letting them go or switching another party member and letting THEM go. This means you can recruit at max 5 mons per dungeon (or 7 if you wanna get rid of 2 of your main teammates). It's basically just forcing extra playtime by making you re-run dungeons multiple times.
-99 floor dungeons. Screw them.
-Dungeons that reset your level to 5. If this was a single dungeon as a one-off challenge it might not be so bad, but there are THREE dungeons like this.
-Can’t feed multiple stat boosting items at once. Have a bunch of gummis or vitamins to give your mon? Gotta do it one by one.
-Dungeons are all basically the same. The themes (of which are limited and reused) never really add any actual gimmicks outside of weather.
Mixed/Not important enough to be a pro or con:
~It's really repetitive, but kind of addicting at the same time.
~Most of the power-up orbs in the game only last for a single room or floor. Keep in mind that some dungeons have up to 99 floors. Trying to use them as any kind of strategy doesn't really work.
~Controls in a dungeon feel stiff and clunky. But it also has an automode which negates this. The fact that letting the game play itself is a SOLUTION feels like a con to me, but if it makes the game more fun to play then that can't be a bad thing.
Note:
•Alakazam’s team is presented as the best team in the game for the story, but it's only gold rank. For reference that's the 5th rank in the game, out of a total of 12. It's kind of embarrassing to see them get so much praise for being a rank that I managed to get to in the main story alone, let alone the 6 (apparently unattainable by anyone) ranks I reached after that.
•Being Pokémon saved this game. Like without the Pokémon coat of paint I think this would be a below-average game.
•I wanted to fully complete this, but gave up on Purity Forest because it's an RNG-filled mess.
+The story is pretty good, albeit short.
+Each move has its own level, meaning that if you level up flamethrower on one mon, every other mon who gets flamethrower will have the powered up version. It's a great quality of life thing.
+The post game is huge. It's almost like the main story is just a tutorial for the larger, but less narrative-driven post-game.
+Having Pokémon as actual characters is fun.
+The constant rewards you get from completing missions makes it so easy for that "just one more dungeon" feeling.
+The water colour aesthetic is pretty nice.
Cons:
-The power of moves and accuracy only shows up as a bar instead of as numbers in the main game, making it kind of hard to compare.
-You can’t filter Pokémon by rare quality, so if you want to find a specific one, good luck searching through the entire list.
-Shiny Pokémon are locked to “Strong” Pokémon, meaning about 20 in total. It's a pretty weird decision that ruins the surprise of finding random shinies.
-Since you can only control the three main teammates, if any of your recruits gets attacked at the back of the group, you have literally no way to get to them to save them. There's not even a tactics option where you can send a main teammate to stay at the rear of a group for such situations. It's incredibly frustrating to constantly get interrupted every step because your Pidgey at the back is being attacked every turn and you can't do anything about it.
-Moves are unbalanced as fuck. Multi-hit moves and room-wide moves are basically the only viable ones in the endgame. Moves with only one tile are borderline useless, making a large section of the mons useless.
-You can only recruit wild Pokémon if the player kills enemy. So you can deal 199/200 damage, but if your teammate Weedle does that last 1hp you won't get a chance to recruit.
-The item inventory stops expanding after a certain rank (until the very last rank, which is a huge grind). Considering it's the most important rank-up reward, having it be stagnant for like 70% of ranks is annoying.
-If your current party is full, you can't just send recruited mons to camp. You have to choose between letting them go or switching another party member and letting THEM go. This means you can recruit at max 5 mons per dungeon (or 7 if you wanna get rid of 2 of your main teammates). It's basically just forcing extra playtime by making you re-run dungeons multiple times.
-99 floor dungeons. Screw them.
-Dungeons that reset your level to 5. If this was a single dungeon as a one-off challenge it might not be so bad, but there are THREE dungeons like this.
-Can’t feed multiple stat boosting items at once. Have a bunch of gummis or vitamins to give your mon? Gotta do it one by one.
-Dungeons are all basically the same. The themes (of which are limited and reused) never really add any actual gimmicks outside of weather.
Mixed/Not important enough to be a pro or con:
~It's really repetitive, but kind of addicting at the same time.
~Most of the power-up orbs in the game only last for a single room or floor. Keep in mind that some dungeons have up to 99 floors. Trying to use them as any kind of strategy doesn't really work.
~Controls in a dungeon feel stiff and clunky. But it also has an automode which negates this. The fact that letting the game play itself is a SOLUTION feels like a con to me, but if it makes the game more fun to play then that can't be a bad thing.
Note:
•Alakazam’s team is presented as the best team in the game for the story, but it's only gold rank. For reference that's the 5th rank in the game, out of a total of 12. It's kind of embarrassing to see them get so much praise for being a rank that I managed to get to in the main story alone, let alone the 6 (apparently unattainable by anyone) ranks I reached after that.
•Being Pokémon saved this game. Like without the Pokémon coat of paint I think this would be a below-average game.
•I wanted to fully complete this, but gave up on Purity Forest because it's an RNG-filled mess.