As someone who had it's doubts about playing it Arceus is certainly better than it looked, it borrows the "just catch" the wild pokemons, no random encounters and pokemons in the open good ideas from let's go, and add in some must needed quality of life changes like not stopping your gameplay every single second like the old ones to delivery a much needed change to the formula.

There are downs as well, the scenery itselft and most importantly the art direction are terrible, the Pokemons don't seen to fit into places frankly because the places look like anything, every island, while i'm glad it isn't a open world, felt like a color swap from the last one. Along side that the pokemon themselves didn't really do much in their habitats, as well as some repeating pokemon in places that doesn't make sense at all contribute to this sense of weirdness.

In the end, it was a fun experience, i ended up almost finishing the pokedex (except for those stupid requirement ones, like LITERALLY a Korok seed one) and enjoying my time with it, there's much more to improve and while in other cases i would say i expected this to be only the first step, as a gamefreak game i'm not so sure.