(Played with no items in battle and pressing B on the switch pokemon prompt after a kill)
I have very mixed feelings about this game, I am someone who has played pokemon for most of his life, specifically since i was 4 and well into my 20s, but this game really makes me sad in so many ways.
The Team Star bossfights, the characters, the final fights of each main quest and the entire final stretch are everything I love about this franchise, but all this is bogged down by a myriad of bad choices like the absence of level scaling for the bossfights, the barren open world where all you do is just fight pokemon and pick up items, lacking any meaningful content or dungeons whatsoever, so you're just left with the landmarks marked on your map to progress the story.
It feels like GameFreak is also scared of just having players face a little bit of challenge, I don't want these games to be insanely hard, but the fact that they can definitely make fights that will test your brain even a little without feeling frustrating, as demonstrated from the final stretch of this game, really shows that something really went wrong in the actual conceptualization for the systems used in the rest of the game, but also those fights are in the same game as a Gym Leader with a level 36 STARAPTOR, with 2 MOVES, as his ACE, and on top of that the removal of set mode makes me feel like I'm playing the game wrong every time i refuse to switch after knocking a pokemon out.
This game is also riddled with technical problems and in general looks horrid, no joke I felt like I had a headache after every play session because it was straining my eyes that hard.
And all this makes me very sad, because GameFreak DOES have that spark still, they DO have the talent, but they just don't have enough time to fully realize their vision because of corporation greed which forces this yearly release schedule on the devs.
This game really needed a few years more in development and it shows, but of course that could never happen under TPC.
I have very mixed feelings about this game, I am someone who has played pokemon for most of his life, specifically since i was 4 and well into my 20s, but this game really makes me sad in so many ways.
The Team Star bossfights, the characters, the final fights of each main quest and the entire final stretch are everything I love about this franchise, but all this is bogged down by a myriad of bad choices like the absence of level scaling for the bossfights, the barren open world where all you do is just fight pokemon and pick up items, lacking any meaningful content or dungeons whatsoever, so you're just left with the landmarks marked on your map to progress the story.
It feels like GameFreak is also scared of just having players face a little bit of challenge, I don't want these games to be insanely hard, but the fact that they can definitely make fights that will test your brain even a little without feeling frustrating, as demonstrated from the final stretch of this game, really shows that something really went wrong in the actual conceptualization for the systems used in the rest of the game, but also those fights are in the same game as a Gym Leader with a level 36 STARAPTOR, with 2 MOVES, as his ACE, and on top of that the removal of set mode makes me feel like I'm playing the game wrong every time i refuse to switch after knocking a pokemon out.
This game is also riddled with technical problems and in general looks horrid, no joke I felt like I had a headache after every play session because it was straining my eyes that hard.
And all this makes me very sad, because GameFreak DOES have that spark still, they DO have the talent, but they just don't have enough time to fully realize their vision because of corporation greed which forces this yearly release schedule on the devs.
This game really needed a few years more in development and it shows, but of course that could never happen under TPC.