Magnificent stuff. So personal to your choices, and profound in its reactions. Improves upon 5e's cumbersome combat system, to the point where it feels actually good to play. (not as good as DOS2's combat system, but close) The expansiveness of the world and your options occasionally threatens to break the game, and there were more than a few annoying bugs, but those are small in comparison to the achievement. My one recommendation is to not feel like you have to investigate everything. Leave some things for a later replay. I'm too much a sucker for completionism in side quests and exploration, don't be me.

I'll write up a second log that's just a spoiler breakdown of my choices.

I enjoyed Pokemon Shield a good bit, even when it felt like a bevy of half-baked features. With Gen 9, Game Freak decides to take 2 steps forward, 10 steps back. The decent open world sections of Gen 8 are stretched around a much larger canvas, tearing sometimes literal holes in the geography. Outside of some solid new Pokemon models, the game is hideous, best imagined as N64 graphics ported into Prop Hunt. It runs like shit, too. Navigation is completely divorced from the game's reality, even when it's running "optimally." The gameplay is very dull, too. It sucks, it's so bad, I mostly hate it.

That said... I really dig most of the new Pokemon, and there are some good mechanics here that are just screaming for a developer that's actually good at coding.