There's a few good ideas and designs sprinkled throughout the game, but otherwise it's so incredibly bland and uninspired. Like if there was two additional years of development and this foundation was fleshed out and refined, this could have been a good game.

Five of the six Pokémon on my team were new to this generation, because I actually quite liked some of them. However, I caught most early on and then basically kept the same team throughout the entire game, as I didn't feel much incentive to "catching them all". Despite these early pickups lacking various typing coverages, I was still able to breeze through the game pretty easily.

Most components of the game had the issue of being okay but unpolished. The one component that stands out as the most egregious however is the game's story. You spend almost the entirety of the game with no real antagonist organization, and when it does finally show up, it's over pretty quickly. There's some lore dropped throughout, but it's all very basic.

If this game released even just a decade ago, it would have probably gotten away with having these flaws and with being incredibly boring, but this series continues to coast and be left in the dust of more modern RPGs and games in general.