Yes, this is an evolution of the series. No, it's not a step forward. It's just different. This game makes a lot of great improvements to the gameplay and then just... stops. It doesn't do anything with it, and I think GameFreak doesn't know what to do with it except create a gameplay grind that is so mind-numbingly dull I'm suprised this isn't an MMO.

The first few hours of this game are actually quite fun because of the novelty of it all. After that, I had a strong feeling of Déjà-vu every time I entered and completed a new zone. There's very few differences in gamplay between the different areas of the game, so few even that I'd call it mostly just a new skin with a slightly different landscape design to complement the new traversal option you get in it. And it's not even a pretty new skin most of the times - it's all so barren, devoid of interesting details and, at some points, hideously ugly. Which would be acceptable if the gameplay loop made the experience any better. It doesn't. For me, playing this was a series of compulsion loops spread over the 15h playtime. 'It's fun to see number go up' - there's nothing more to this game. Which makes it a decent time-waster. If you've got nothing to do, want something lowbrow to play and sink some hours into, this might be an okay pick for you. It might also not be, because the compulsion loop is quite desolate gameplay-wise: Catch, fight or run. Those are the options. None of them are particularly exciting. There are better time-wasters out there.

Paradoxically, even the Pokémon feel less alive in this game than they ever did before. The ones in your team are there, for you, in your inventory, to farm materials, to enter battles. They do not really interact with you in any way I'd call significant. It all feels like they're now just part of my inventory of tools to traverse the world. Which, I admit, is not that different to the games that came before, but they still had a way to create a connection, to somehow make you think these polygon models were 'more than'. In Legends, they are not 'more than', they feel like exactly that. Which is sad. The foto studio tries to add that feeling back into the experience, but it's so robotic, so rudimentary in nature that the one from US/UM seems like the evolution of it, not the predecessor. The Pokémon in the overworld have a similar problem: They're there, walking around, possibly attacking you when you see them, sometimes they sleep. That's all the behaviours there are of all the Pokémon there are. They don't interact with the world - or each other - in any meaningful way, trotting aimlessly, directionless.

I was really excited for this game. The one thing that always kept the series exciting for me were the Pokémon themselves. Here, they feel like sacrifices to feed the compulsion loop of the seemingly endless Pokédex-grind. They've probably always been that. But this time I noticed.