Warning: Wall of Text
Controversial take up front: The "Dexit" was actually a great thing and I really wish they would remove more bloat from the games. Who fucking cares if Stantler is not in the game, get over yourself. Use something you've never used before. People who transfer Pokémon they used previously into a brand new game file are weirdos tbh.
Anyway... Sword and Shield definitely have some good aspects to them, but thoroughly disappoint with the execution.
- I liked the setting, with the Gym battles growing more and more in popularity, more people recognizing you, etc.
- Lots of great Pokémon designs.
- I loved that Regional Variants returned, as I was concerned that it'd stay a Gen 7 thing only. Even better, they also added Variants of Pokémon outside of Gen 1.
- Obtaining Pokémon that can be used in competitive fights is now easier than ever, thanks to Raids and items that change a Pokémon's Nature or Ability, for example.
- Some Characters are charming and have decent writing, while others have completely nonsensical writing or an obviously lacking/lackluster character arc.
The thing is: Pokémon games don't need a good story to be fun at all. But the fact that they obviously tried to write one but failed in almost all aspects makes its existence very grating and leaves you with a bitter taste once you finish the main story, and possibly also during some post-game stuff. It's just... so bad... It's extremely obvious that they ran out of time to flesh out anything in the ending.
There's plenty of other parts of the game where you can practically feel the crunch that Game Freak was very obviously forced to work under, whether it's obviously cut content or severe lack of polish of existing content.
Graphically, the games borders on amateurish. Ugly textures, stiff animations for some Pokémon and NPCs (especially cutscenes), FPS issues. The Wild Area is conceptually a nice idea, but the way Pokémon just pop up 3 meters in front of you is awful. Yes, I get that it'd be tons of work to optimize it, making a low LOD model for each Pokémon or whatever. At that point I'd rather just not have the Wild Area at all. But you gotta have cool features to advertise your game I guess!
Sadly, there still is many things I can complain about:
- The terribly obvious, grating lack of any sort of voice acting. Especially since there are several cutscenes that focus on a character speaking or even worse, singing. Can one of the most successful videogame franchises in the world really not afford to have JUST SOME voice acting in a mainline game?
- The Online functions were awful. Terrible to navigate, stupidly hard to play together with friends.
- Gigantamax is just another tacked on marketing feature that will be forgotten and irrelevant in the next game.
- Speaking of Gigantamax: Raids made it especially obvious how fucking s l o w the fights are whenever status effects of any sort happen. Fighting a Raid Pokémon with Intimidate means that you'll have to wait a fucking minute before you can perform any action because it has to play the animation for EVERY SINGLE POKÉMON and then have the dialog for "X's attack fell!" pop up for EVERY SINGLE POKÉMON AGAIN. PLEASE, make a toggable fast-mode for this shit.
- Some Pokémon are ridiculously hard to catch/find - and they are usually not even good. I really wanted to use a Solosis but it had stupidly specific conditions to appear. And then there is shit like Runerigus. WHY?
- Forced EXP share. I tried to be open to the idea and used a team of 12 Pokémon instead of 6 and rotated them in and out, but I rather wouldn't have needed to. Also I was still overleved most of the time lol
- And last but not least, one of the worst and most annoying "features" is level restrictions for catching Pokémon. Once a Pokémon is JUST ONE SINGLE LEVEL above your current(!) mon, it's near IMPOSSIBLE to catch. What the fuck? Yes, I get that they didn't want people to catch something 20 level above their current adequate level to steamroll everything. But surely that shouldn't stop anyone from catching a level 13 Pokémon when most of my team is level 15 and my leading Pokémon happened to be level 12?? Absolutely infuriating bullshit feature implemented in the least elegant way possible.
In the end, it sadly still is a Pokémon game, so people will buy it - including myself, full price and all. I love Pokémon, I really do. But it's been obvious for several generations that they let Game Freak - still a relatively small company - work on a shoestring budget to produce mainline games for one of the biggest and highest grossing video game franchises in the whole world. That grade of greed is just sad, but sadly it works.
Controversial take up front: The "Dexit" was actually a great thing and I really wish they would remove more bloat from the games. Who fucking cares if Stantler is not in the game, get over yourself. Use something you've never used before. People who transfer Pokémon they used previously into a brand new game file are weirdos tbh.
Anyway... Sword and Shield definitely have some good aspects to them, but thoroughly disappoint with the execution.
- I liked the setting, with the Gym battles growing more and more in popularity, more people recognizing you, etc.
- Lots of great Pokémon designs.
- I loved that Regional Variants returned, as I was concerned that it'd stay a Gen 7 thing only. Even better, they also added Variants of Pokémon outside of Gen 1.
- Obtaining Pokémon that can be used in competitive fights is now easier than ever, thanks to Raids and items that change a Pokémon's Nature or Ability, for example.
- Some Characters are charming and have decent writing, while others have completely nonsensical writing or an obviously lacking/lackluster character arc.
The thing is: Pokémon games don't need a good story to be fun at all. But the fact that they obviously tried to write one but failed in almost all aspects makes its existence very grating and leaves you with a bitter taste once you finish the main story, and possibly also during some post-game stuff. It's just... so bad... It's extremely obvious that they ran out of time to flesh out anything in the ending.
There's plenty of other parts of the game where you can practically feel the crunch that Game Freak was very obviously forced to work under, whether it's obviously cut content or severe lack of polish of existing content.
Graphically, the games borders on amateurish. Ugly textures, stiff animations for some Pokémon and NPCs (especially cutscenes), FPS issues. The Wild Area is conceptually a nice idea, but the way Pokémon just pop up 3 meters in front of you is awful. Yes, I get that it'd be tons of work to optimize it, making a low LOD model for each Pokémon or whatever. At that point I'd rather just not have the Wild Area at all. But you gotta have cool features to advertise your game I guess!
Sadly, there still is many things I can complain about:
- The terribly obvious, grating lack of any sort of voice acting. Especially since there are several cutscenes that focus on a character speaking or even worse, singing. Can one of the most successful videogame franchises in the world really not afford to have JUST SOME voice acting in a mainline game?
- The Online functions were awful. Terrible to navigate, stupidly hard to play together with friends.
- Gigantamax is just another tacked on marketing feature that will be forgotten and irrelevant in the next game.
- Speaking of Gigantamax: Raids made it especially obvious how fucking s l o w the fights are whenever status effects of any sort happen. Fighting a Raid Pokémon with Intimidate means that you'll have to wait a fucking minute before you can perform any action because it has to play the animation for EVERY SINGLE POKÉMON and then have the dialog for "X's attack fell!" pop up for EVERY SINGLE POKÉMON AGAIN. PLEASE, make a toggable fast-mode for this shit.
- Some Pokémon are ridiculously hard to catch/find - and they are usually not even good. I really wanted to use a Solosis but it had stupidly specific conditions to appear. And then there is shit like Runerigus. WHY?
- Forced EXP share. I tried to be open to the idea and used a team of 12 Pokémon instead of 6 and rotated them in and out, but I rather wouldn't have needed to. Also I was still overleved most of the time lol
- And last but not least, one of the worst and most annoying "features" is level restrictions for catching Pokémon. Once a Pokémon is JUST ONE SINGLE LEVEL above your current(!) mon, it's near IMPOSSIBLE to catch. What the fuck? Yes, I get that they didn't want people to catch something 20 level above their current adequate level to steamroll everything. But surely that shouldn't stop anyone from catching a level 13 Pokémon when most of my team is level 15 and my leading Pokémon happened to be level 12?? Absolutely infuriating bullshit feature implemented in the least elegant way possible.
In the end, it sadly still is a Pokémon game, so people will buy it - including myself, full price and all. I love Pokémon, I really do. But it's been obvious for several generations that they let Game Freak - still a relatively small company - work on a shoestring budget to produce mainline games for one of the biggest and highest grossing video game franchises in the whole world. That grade of greed is just sad, but sadly it works.