This game answers a lot of the complaints people had with Sword and Shield, yet somehow lowers the quality of the work even further.
It's clear that a lot was put into it, you've got a ton of little quality of life features peppered throughout, such as the game turning you to face a waypoint you just created, or not being able to accidentally KO pokémon in auto battles. At the same time, it feels like so much was put into these new features that the base gameplay was left unattended, especially but not only in the performance department.
The world felt empty a lot of the time. Due to the poor pokémon render distance and spawning speed, you can't really use pokémon you want to catch as waypoints since they don't show up unless you're already in walking distance to them. The environments, while pretty, feel devoid of any points of interest aside from the generic looking towers with a fast travel point and a Gimmighoul on them. While it's cool that the trainer classes aren't just a single character repeated over and over anymore, none of them are particularly interesting because you know they're just there to give you exp and count towards your free item at the pokémon center. The tera raids and tera pokémon were fun for most of the game, but after a while you've pretty much seen the whole pool of possible pokémon and have not much incentive to go for them anymore. The tera gimmick in general is really fun to use in battle, but they made the odd choice of only being able to use it once before having to recharge it at a pokémon center, which made me feel like I had to save it for the harder battles... which were none of them.
At the same time, the story was really fun this time. The three paths let you choose what kind of reward you'd rather get at the time between higher level pokémon, mobility upgrades and new TMs. While the Team Star path was lackluster mechanics and rewards wise, I found the character writing in this game pretty good! I had fun learning about all of them and eventually seeing them all come together on the final act. While the story isn't as deep as something like Black and White, I found it way more interesting than SwSh and SM. And despite the game being really easy and not giving you many opportunities to mess with tera and the new items and abilities in a more in-depth way, the competitive VGC scene is looking pretty fun right now (at least until they allow legendaries).
Overall, I've had a lot of fun with the game, but it worries me that people aren't really scrutinizing the state of the game past the framerate aspect - which does matter but is also a result of the short development cycle and (probable) crunch. I hope Gamefreak staff is in good health and wonder how much longer it'll take people to realize that the executives are pushing out half finished games because people buy it either way.
It's clear that a lot was put into it, you've got a ton of little quality of life features peppered throughout, such as the game turning you to face a waypoint you just created, or not being able to accidentally KO pokémon in auto battles. At the same time, it feels like so much was put into these new features that the base gameplay was left unattended, especially but not only in the performance department.
The world felt empty a lot of the time. Due to the poor pokémon render distance and spawning speed, you can't really use pokémon you want to catch as waypoints since they don't show up unless you're already in walking distance to them. The environments, while pretty, feel devoid of any points of interest aside from the generic looking towers with a fast travel point and a Gimmighoul on them. While it's cool that the trainer classes aren't just a single character repeated over and over anymore, none of them are particularly interesting because you know they're just there to give you exp and count towards your free item at the pokémon center. The tera raids and tera pokémon were fun for most of the game, but after a while you've pretty much seen the whole pool of possible pokémon and have not much incentive to go for them anymore. The tera gimmick in general is really fun to use in battle, but they made the odd choice of only being able to use it once before having to recharge it at a pokémon center, which made me feel like I had to save it for the harder battles... which were none of them.
At the same time, the story was really fun this time. The three paths let you choose what kind of reward you'd rather get at the time between higher level pokémon, mobility upgrades and new TMs. While the Team Star path was lackluster mechanics and rewards wise, I found the character writing in this game pretty good! I had fun learning about all of them and eventually seeing them all come together on the final act. While the story isn't as deep as something like Black and White, I found it way more interesting than SwSh and SM. And despite the game being really easy and not giving you many opportunities to mess with tera and the new items and abilities in a more in-depth way, the competitive VGC scene is looking pretty fun right now (at least until they allow legendaries).
Overall, I've had a lot of fun with the game, but it worries me that people aren't really scrutinizing the state of the game past the framerate aspect - which does matter but is also a result of the short development cycle and (probable) crunch. I hope Gamefreak staff is in good health and wonder how much longer it'll take people to realize that the executives are pushing out half finished games because people buy it either way.