At the launch of Pokemon Go, I made a lot of cool memories. Overall, the brief cultural phenomenon surrounding this game was a treat, and I'm glad I participated in it. That said, I believe there has never been a larger waste of potential than Pokemon Go, and that such a thing should never have been entrusted to a company like Niantic. At launch, Pokemon Go featured a built in tracker which allowed players to "hunt" Pokemon, following their little phone-compass to track down invisible, valuable beasts. This experience of Pokemon hunting was incredible and made collecting Pokemon an absolute joy. This feature was broken mere days after I started playing, and stayed broken. Across the globe, millions of players wondered when this core mechanic of the game would be "fixed" and received no answer. No communication on the subject at all, for weeks upon weeks. As it turns out, the tracker was never "broken" it was simply removed without explanation or notification. The thrill of Pokemon catching sharply and abruptly declined following the change, but for me personally the biggest takeaway was that Niantic was completely inept. I tried desperately to imagine some parallel universe where any other company had a pivotal feature of their wildly popular multiplayer game stop working as it previously had, and the change went unaddressed for weeks on end. I tried to imagine if raid instances in World of Warcraft simply broke and Blizzard just never said a word about it to anyone. This was my primary indication that Niantic, as game developers at least, were incompetent and wildly unreliable.

Pokemon has always and will always be supported by three core pillars. Trading, battling, and collecting. Of these three core pillars, one was entirely missing, the second existed only as a pale and lifeless shadow of itself, and the third was crippled shortly after launch. I realize that trading now exists in Pokemon Go, but launching what is essentially a Pokemon MMO without the ability to trade Pokemon is as close to heresy as I've ever heard. Players were also unable to battle each other, an even more grievous sin. PvP is essentially the lifeblood of Pokemon. It is pretty much the entire premise of both the anime, and the main plot of every main series game. Essentially the Pokemon MMO that I had dreamed of for years, launched without any of the features I would want such a game to have, and without the battle system that makes Pokemon worth playing.

While Pokemon Go's catching system is interesting (although frustrating what with the precious real life monetary value of Pokeballs) its battle system is a farce. The rich and complex systems of the main series games have been stripped out entirely. The outcomes of battles are mainly decided by the levels of Pokemon involved, how fast a player can fill their screen with filthy fingerprints, and how well they can play around maddening lag. There is little semblance of balance, with Vaporeon, an extremely easy to obtain Pokemon, dominating the early meta. Playing Pokemon Go outside of a major city is an infinitely worse experience than playing it in a bustling metropolis and cheating is rampant.

There are two reasons I can't rate Pokemon Go lower. First, its GPS mechanics and its capturing of the public's imagination created a beautiful once in a lifetime experience, where strangers met in places both familiar and not, and a great social time was had by all. Second, and I know that players of the game have been screaming this at me the entire time, the game has improved drastically since launch. Trading is in, PvP is in, along with several other systems that just straight up make the game better. Honestly, the state of the game at launch left such an awful taste in my mouth and set such a low standard for my confidence in Niantic that I don't think the game can ever win me back. Besides... the battles still suck.

UPDATE: It won me back.