Despite the huge controversy involving this game, I really enjoyed it. Obviously it's still Pokémon, if you've enjoyed Pokémon at its most basic level, I see no reason you wouldn't enjoy this.
I absolutely love what this game does with gym battles, turning it into a huge competition. Everyone starting at the same time means you get a true feeling of progression, and as you go on you hear of more and more challengers who had to drop out due to it being too tough. The way it starts out with you registering with everyone else, then going to sleep at a hotel before waking up to see a crowd of people gathered to cheer you on creates such a huge scale of excitement.
It does kind of die down near the end unfortunately. By the 5th or 6th gym the challenge is treated almost like any other game, until we get to the finals, which once again bring up the scale far above anything seen in past games.
So overall I really enjoyed the story, even if it was simple. Just you, the player, on a quest to become the greatest trainer of all time. It's what all the games have technically been about, but this is the first one that truly made me feel like the game took it seriously. I also liked the little sub plots it caused, like Bede being disqualified and then picked up as the fairy type gym leader.
The difficulty in this game is a somewhat weird one. While I do feel like the game is scaled to exp share, the Wild Area makes trying to predict player levels a mammoth task. A player could skip the Wild Area completely and maybe be under-leveled, especially if they don't catch or beat any wild Pokémon. On the other hand a player could spend hours and hours in there before even getting their first gym badge. By adding so much freedom to the player without dynamic scaling, finding the sweet spot is difficult. I had a really weird experience myself, for the first 3 gyms I was slightly ahead of the gym leaders, then the 4th gym had a big boost and caught up to me, but after that, despite me not changing my play-style, I skyrocketed ahead of the rest of the gym leaders.
This weird level curve is especially prevalent in the "champion cup" as its called. It's essentially a long stretch of story which, while technically possible to take a break from and grind, isn't encouraged at all by the way it pushes itself forward. But when I started this section I was about 10 levels ahead of the first opponents Pokémon, then by the time I got the champion I was actually slightly under-levelled. The game essentially makes it that you have to be over-levelled for most of the climax to stand a chance against the final boss; it's such weird game design.
As for the Exp scaling, the game uses the method of giving less exp the higher level you are compared to your opponent. This works pretty well for the most part, but there's one major flaw: Wild Pokémon. For some crazy reason the wild Pokémon in this game are far above even the trainers in their area. Hell I ran into a few wild Pokémon that were higher level than me! Since a huge part of Pokémon has always been to "catch 'em all", naturally I did try to catch a bunch of Pokémon on my journey, but because they were all buffed to crazy levels, the idea of getting less exp for beating/catching lower level Pokémon kind of became futile. If they just lowered the levels of the wild mons it would have done so much to improve game balance. Of course you could just ignore them to not get the exp, but if your idea of game design is to not play as much of the game as you can, there's a problem.
Presentation in this game is definitely a step above anything we've seen in the series so far. Gym battles alone are a great example of this, as now there's no transition between the pre-battle dialogue and the battle itself. Instead the opponent and your character with get into position and it flows into the start of battle seamlessly. Add in a bunch of Mid-battle dialogue and it really helps make these battles stand out from the rest, whereas in previous games the only real difference between a gym battle and a regular battle was the music and a slight difficulty increase. Unfortunately it's not all great, a lot of the animations and cutscenes still look cheap. It's a shame because the very early cutscene of the starters showed such great promise, but nothing like that ever really came up again.
Going on to the things that make this game unique over other Pokémon games, let's start with Dynamax. Personally I hated it. Mechanically it just feels like a mish-mash of Megas and Z-Moves, but both of them done far worse. And from a practical point of view, trying to imagine these Pokémon fighting each other at that size is just ridiculous. I would have much preferred to just have no gimmick at all over this.
The Wild Area is decent. It's not super deep or anything, and the weather effects changing from area to area look janky as all hell, but it does a pretty good job of showing off a bunch of Pokémon walking around, making it feel alive and active. Raid battles are also a fun addition, even though I don't think they have the staying power I think Gamefreak wants them to. But the amount of rewards you get every time you clear one is bound to set off those happy chemicals in your brain that make you want to keep playing.
The gym challenges before the gym battles themselves are very hit or miss. On one hand we have creative ideas, like trying to gain points by catching/defeating Pokémon while also having to deal with an NPC trying to sabotage you, we have things that give a unique gameplay mechanic that we've never seen before in Pokémon, like the spinning cup thing, or Wooloo herding. Then we have ideas that aren't necessarily bad, but aren't new, like the water maze feels very similar to past gyms with switches/levels to control water flow. But then the last 2 gyms just gave up completely and made the pre-leader challenges just a bunch of trainer fights. Even the fairy gym, which is done in the style of a quiz - not a new concept, but they try to make it feel fresh by adding stat boosts/debuffs depending on your answer - feels worse than old versions as the questions no longer test your knowledge of Pokémon and instead just ask dumb questions about the gym leader that feel like they're purposely set up to trick you. Overall it's a promising concept that just wasn't utilised very well outside of a couple of gyms.
I had fun with the game, and other than a certain lack of undeniable cheapness in certain scripted events, which give the impression this was a 3DS game, it does its job just fine. What's wrong with it is what it doesn't have, because there's so much damn potential in this game just begging to come out. This could have easily been the best game in the series if they just put in some extra effort.
I absolutely love what this game does with gym battles, turning it into a huge competition. Everyone starting at the same time means you get a true feeling of progression, and as you go on you hear of more and more challengers who had to drop out due to it being too tough. The way it starts out with you registering with everyone else, then going to sleep at a hotel before waking up to see a crowd of people gathered to cheer you on creates such a huge scale of excitement.
It does kind of die down near the end unfortunately. By the 5th or 6th gym the challenge is treated almost like any other game, until we get to the finals, which once again bring up the scale far above anything seen in past games.
So overall I really enjoyed the story, even if it was simple. Just you, the player, on a quest to become the greatest trainer of all time. It's what all the games have technically been about, but this is the first one that truly made me feel like the game took it seriously. I also liked the little sub plots it caused, like Bede being disqualified and then picked up as the fairy type gym leader.
The difficulty in this game is a somewhat weird one. While I do feel like the game is scaled to exp share, the Wild Area makes trying to predict player levels a mammoth task. A player could skip the Wild Area completely and maybe be under-leveled, especially if they don't catch or beat any wild Pokémon. On the other hand a player could spend hours and hours in there before even getting their first gym badge. By adding so much freedom to the player without dynamic scaling, finding the sweet spot is difficult. I had a really weird experience myself, for the first 3 gyms I was slightly ahead of the gym leaders, then the 4th gym had a big boost and caught up to me, but after that, despite me not changing my play-style, I skyrocketed ahead of the rest of the gym leaders.
This weird level curve is especially prevalent in the "champion cup" as its called. It's essentially a long stretch of story which, while technically possible to take a break from and grind, isn't encouraged at all by the way it pushes itself forward. But when I started this section I was about 10 levels ahead of the first opponents Pokémon, then by the time I got the champion I was actually slightly under-levelled. The game essentially makes it that you have to be over-levelled for most of the climax to stand a chance against the final boss; it's such weird game design.
As for the Exp scaling, the game uses the method of giving less exp the higher level you are compared to your opponent. This works pretty well for the most part, but there's one major flaw: Wild Pokémon. For some crazy reason the wild Pokémon in this game are far above even the trainers in their area. Hell I ran into a few wild Pokémon that were higher level than me! Since a huge part of Pokémon has always been to "catch 'em all", naturally I did try to catch a bunch of Pokémon on my journey, but because they were all buffed to crazy levels, the idea of getting less exp for beating/catching lower level Pokémon kind of became futile. If they just lowered the levels of the wild mons it would have done so much to improve game balance. Of course you could just ignore them to not get the exp, but if your idea of game design is to not play as much of the game as you can, there's a problem.
Presentation in this game is definitely a step above anything we've seen in the series so far. Gym battles alone are a great example of this, as now there's no transition between the pre-battle dialogue and the battle itself. Instead the opponent and your character with get into position and it flows into the start of battle seamlessly. Add in a bunch of Mid-battle dialogue and it really helps make these battles stand out from the rest, whereas in previous games the only real difference between a gym battle and a regular battle was the music and a slight difficulty increase. Unfortunately it's not all great, a lot of the animations and cutscenes still look cheap. It's a shame because the very early cutscene of the starters showed such great promise, but nothing like that ever really came up again.
Going on to the things that make this game unique over other Pokémon games, let's start with Dynamax. Personally I hated it. Mechanically it just feels like a mish-mash of Megas and Z-Moves, but both of them done far worse. And from a practical point of view, trying to imagine these Pokémon fighting each other at that size is just ridiculous. I would have much preferred to just have no gimmick at all over this.
The Wild Area is decent. It's not super deep or anything, and the weather effects changing from area to area look janky as all hell, but it does a pretty good job of showing off a bunch of Pokémon walking around, making it feel alive and active. Raid battles are also a fun addition, even though I don't think they have the staying power I think Gamefreak wants them to. But the amount of rewards you get every time you clear one is bound to set off those happy chemicals in your brain that make you want to keep playing.
The gym challenges before the gym battles themselves are very hit or miss. On one hand we have creative ideas, like trying to gain points by catching/defeating Pokémon while also having to deal with an NPC trying to sabotage you, we have things that give a unique gameplay mechanic that we've never seen before in Pokémon, like the spinning cup thing, or Wooloo herding. Then we have ideas that aren't necessarily bad, but aren't new, like the water maze feels very similar to past gyms with switches/levels to control water flow. But then the last 2 gyms just gave up completely and made the pre-leader challenges just a bunch of trainer fights. Even the fairy gym, which is done in the style of a quiz - not a new concept, but they try to make it feel fresh by adding stat boosts/debuffs depending on your answer - feels worse than old versions as the questions no longer test your knowledge of Pokémon and instead just ask dumb questions about the gym leader that feel like they're purposely set up to trick you. Overall it's a promising concept that just wasn't utilised very well outside of a couple of gyms.
I had fun with the game, and other than a certain lack of undeniable cheapness in certain scripted events, which give the impression this was a 3DS game, it does its job just fine. What's wrong with it is what it doesn't have, because there's so much damn potential in this game just begging to come out. This could have easily been the best game in the series if they just put in some extra effort.