I've always had a bit of a strange relationship with The Legend of Zelda - it is a series that I recognize is objectively great - but I realize I haven't always had the patience for it. Yet because of its reputation, as well as me being a bit of a Nintendo enthusiast, I always have felt like it should be one of my favorite series ever.

The Breath of the Wild style initially felt like the answer for me - as such, Breath of the Wild felt so fresh and different compared to the previous 3D entries, and I appreciated that the game didn't force you to do anything. The choose your own adventure type of gameplay made it feel like the Zelda game I was always hoping for growing up, and as such, it pretty quickly became my favorite game in the series. While Zelda has traditionally been more about solving a series of puzzles, that wasn’t really my cup of tea, and while I know many Zeldas fans don’t agree at all, I prefer the heavier focus on exploration in this game, and like how they implemented shrines as a contrast.

Tears of the Kingdom, at first glance, feels like it should be another step closer toward becoming my ultimate Zelda adventure. It took the rather bland temples and bosses, and gave them a major buff in themeing and personality. The game does have a somewhat interesting storyline, and in comparison, it makes you realize that BOTW's story feels like a rather "default" Zelda story.

In an attempt to make things fresh while using the same map as BOTW, the game features 3 total layers to the map. Because the game realizes that there's a lot of navigation, the new runes give you the tools to make travel much less tedious than before, through new abilities like the ultrahand combined with the autobuild feature. Ascend makes many of the hidden discoveries of the world conveniently a one way trip, and recall allows for much easier exploration of the sky Islands. To round out these major new abilities, the fuse ability makes enemy drops much more valuable now and makes the average resource much more useful overall.

While the game was clearly made with convenience and even player creativity in mind though, I see many people feeling disconnected with this game. And this is something that happened to me too. I played about 40 hours back in May when the game launched - but oddly, it wasn't until December when I finally became motivated enough to actually finish the game. And I’ve noticed many people, even self proclaimed Zelda fans, have not come back to finish it yet, wondering if there is something just wrong with them due to the game’s reputation.

I've wondered why this is. Because in December, I had a lot of fun with the game. It's clearly a quality game. It improved upon a quality game. I enjoyed the resolution of the story and the ending felt impactful. So what's the issue here? Well, I have a theory. And it's that the game doesn't really do a strong job of getting players hooked.

Video games are a unique form of media, due to them being interactive. When you start playing a game, your expectation is that you're going to play. But many games seem to start off with many tutorials, and many cutscenes. It makes sense of course - you need to learn how to play - and you need to know what's going on.

But the problem with building up so much story information so early is that players often don't have a reason to care yet. Characters are ultimately ineffective if players don't yet feel a connection to them. Considering this game is a sequel though, of a popular game series nonetheless, it feels like Zelda is uniquely suited to get away with its slow opening since players likely want to see how Link and Zelda’s relationship has developed in the years after the calamity to begin with. But that’s where we reach a little bit of a dilemma.

If you’re going to start a game off with more story information, and advertise it as a direct sequel to the previous game, where players are somewhat expected to have a little bit of an idea of what’s going on even from the start, you need to treat the rest of the game like a sequel, in my eyes. And TOTK seemed to do that on a very inconsistent basis.

Some characters, like Purah, Impa, and Paya, have all had changes in their lives since the last game. Yet all the characters you interact with in the regional phenomena main quest seem to have little to no recollection of the things they talked to you about back in the first game. There is no mention of the divine beasts anywhere, which feels a little comedic. The irony here is that the divine beasts, in practically all the unfortunate circumstances facing the kingdom in this game, would’ve acted as a solution for the regional phenomena to begin with. Zora’s Domain is covered in sludge you say? Wouldn’t a controllable giant elephant that can cause excessive downpour in a specified area be useful right about now? It seems like the divine beasts and champions of the first game have been whitewashed out of the lore of the game. The reason why feels like they just wanted to make an easier plot, and the presence of things like the divine beasts would’ve made a simple plot make a little less sense, which is a bit disappointing.

The Sky Islands were advertised as a major feature of this game, but they only really seem relevant in the tutorial section of the game. Honestly this was a bit of a questionable decision since they really are not designed in an open way compared to The Great Plateau back in the first game. The game is an open world game, but this whole section acts in a linear fashion. In a sense, it loses out on the sense of wonder that I think many people felt when playing Breath of the Wild for the first time.

After the tutorial, there is not much reason to ever go back up to them again. Most islands just have like one treasure or something, but these treasures typically never feel like they're worth the hassle of getting there. You can use recall on rocks that fell from the sky as a way to get back up to the platforms from the ground, but after a few times of trying this, I eventually stopped caring and passed them up on my own accord. I just didn’t really care.

This went for other things as well - the koroks who needed help reaching their friends, helping the sign guy, and even going for treasure in the depths. I’m glad these features and sidequests were in the game for the Zelda enthusiasts who want to play for 300 hours and do absolutely everything - for me though, it just did not click enough, and that’s fine. But I do wish the game could’ve convinced me to do more.

The depths essentially acted as what the sky islands were advertised to be, pretty much doubling the size of the map. Overall I wasn’t a huge fan of them - I liked the exploration part of it, and a lot more powerful stuff could be found in the depths as well. But near the end of it all, I felt like I was going through the motions, only seeking out the next lightroot, just so I could complete the map. I wondered if it really mattered or if it was worth it, since really there were only limited things of interest down there, namely with the Yiga Clan and Kogha’s awkward boss fights.

All in all, my experience with this game was strange. I know it’s better than Breath of the Wild, and it feels ludicrous to even suggest that it isn’t. And maybe I am detracting from my experience with the game based upon lofty expectations, or penalizing it not on by its own merits, but because it's a sequel. But weirdly, I think I had more fun playing its prequel. And that’s not really a knock on Tears of the Kingdom - I really liked Breath of the Wild as well. The world was just not really a breath of fresh air anymore.

The thing that did stand out in comparison was just the story though. Similarly to Breath of the Wild, you can unlock special cutscenes through exploring the world map. The cutscenes were easier for me to find in this game, because they were all attached to a giant geoglyph that could be seen from the sky. Each geoglyph would contain a dragon tear that would initiate each scene. These functioned similarly to the memories of the first game, but with one major unfortunate difference. The tears of the kingdom were used to tell the story of the game - and as such, allowing players to see the cutscenes in any order takes away from the impact of the story, in my opinion. Seeing the cutscenes in an effectively random order worked in the first game, because the memories didn’t have a direct order like in the sequel. Link also had amnesia in that game - and this is actually a rather accurate representation of what regaining memories would be like. The tears were just different. They were naturally ordered.

Going to fight the final boss after experiencing the most intense build up (i.e. learning the story in the right sequence, and recently reaching the climax) would have been great in my mind, but that’s not to say that the ending wasn't a great experience. It took a bit more preparation than I was initially expecting - I realized I had to cook some new types of healing items, but once you are properly prepared, it is quite a thrilling closer all the way through to the end, with a satisfying enough conclusion. It definitely eclipsed Breath of the Wild in this regard, mainly due to the attempt of having a story this time. BOTW’s dark beast segment was “epic”, but not really “impactful”, in my mind. TOTK does deliver in this regard, and even has some other neat touches throughout the game that are story related. There is a permanent subtle change to the blood moon cutscene that occurs at a certain point in the game for instance, that is actually pretty cool when you think about it from a story perspective. It’s the type of stuff you expect from the developers of a franchise like this one.

So all in all, this was a worthy follow up. I think it is pretty clearly an improved game, and perhaps it will make going back to the original feel difficult, where all the new mechanics won’t be part of the gameplay. But I do think that the game probably could’ve been better if it acted more as a natural continuation of Breath of the Wild’s world. In many ways, it feels like Tears of the Kingdom kind of minimizes the world of the first game by just not acknowledging some, but not all, details that should’ve carried over. And this is fine in most cases - but when you are carrying over the exact same world and explaining the reason why the first game happened to begin with, I don’t think most veteran players will appreciate a lack of continuity, because it comes across as feeling like you wasted your time with the first game to begin with. That is what will happen without fail when a sequel essentially states that the threat of the first game was only a small part of an overarching issue. One might argue that some bought TOTK and never played through BOTW, but as mentioned before, BOTW’s story was not super deep or hard to understand to begin with. I think making a sequel was a fine idea, I just think it would’ve been better if they truly went all in on making it feel like one, rather than only going half way. You have to go with the all or nothing approach here, because anything else will result in a world that feels like an alternate timeline.

So a lot of this review was quite nitpicky, but admittedly, that’s what happens when the bar is high. Tears of the Kingdom was still an experience worth playing, and I don’t regret my time with the game. If I had truly gotten tired of the game, I definitely could've finished it up with much less than a hundred hours of logged playtime. I do hope that perhaps the next game tries out a different world if they continue going the open world route, however. I think there’s only so much that can be done with this part of the Zelda timeline. Regardless of direction, I'm excited to see what comes next, and excited to see if they end up taking the feedback that myself and many others are echoing as well. I think they will take everything into consideration, because certain things (not all) were changed from Breath of the Wild. I know it's going to be a great time regardless, but it's always nice to see talented developers still consider fan feedback :)

Paper Mario is so controversial and divisive at this point that I think fair and honest discourse surrounding the series is really difficult to come by. Typically you get categorized into one of two camps, and when allowing this to happen as a community, we effectively prevent ourselves from taking a look at the finer aspects of a game that was sent to the shadow realm long before its launch.

Paper Mario: Color Splash by all accounts had one of the worst reveal trailers I think I've ever seen from a video game. Not only did it look bland and uninspired, but it doubled down on a completely hated entry in the Paper Mario series in Sticker Star. Tone-deaf doesn't even begin to describe how poorly this trailer came across to the longtime fans of the series, and its presentation made it appear to be an afterthought to Nintendo if anything. It felt like more of a personal attack than anything else, and it left me wondering if I was even a fan of a series that I used to call my favorite of all time.

Initial concerns were rather warranted, and the game suffered immensely because of the decisions put into the combat system. This game was not a RPG, but like its predecessor, it very much pretended to be one. The battles, while better than Sticker Star, very much felt lifeless. Gamers often hate using consumable items because of the irrational fear that you might need something later, and that is the name of the game here. I often found that I could end every encounter on the first turn if I truly wanted. The battle was less about finding a way to defeat an enemy, and much more about finding out the minimal amount of resources you could use to do so. There were some instances where I wanted to run away from a battle that I could clearly win.

But the interesting thing about this game is that the more I looked into it, the more I kept getting surprised. The initial trailers gave me no hope it would be anything, but then I started seeing some signs of life.

I reluctantly ended up getting this game for Christmas in 2016, 4 years after Sticker Star. For Sticker Star, I wasn't aware of what the game was going to be like before playing, and I was massively disappointed as a result. But Color Splash ended up being the opposite: having zero expectations, I found myself surprised at how much I actually ended up enjoying the game. And I'm not saying that to just be nice either. The game didn't just have bright spots. I thought it was actually good. This is because while the battling system was not good, so much else was.

One of the features that stood out in the original trailer was the returning of a world map, like in Sticker Star. This resulted in many groans, but as I played the game, I realized that the world map was actually a great approach for this game.

Unlike in Sticker Star - each level really stood out. Each one had a distinguishing factor that made it completely unique from the other ones, and no idea really overstayed its welcome. Many of these were standard types of levels you would expect to see in a platformer game like this one, but many had more gimmicky themes. While Sticker Star felt like a RPG version of New Super Mario Bros, Color Splash seemed to have unique ideas not seen in other places.

Like the games that came before, the game was split into what we call "chapters". These chapters all had an overarching quest that spanned across multiple levels, that would justify taking you back and forth between them. This could include finding some sages, rescuing a "pet", going on a voyage, etc. But the challenges you would encounter in each individual world kept things pretty engaging. Admittedly, like in most Paper Mario games, the highlights really start hitting around the middle of the game, so you will miss out if you can't get through an early game that feels a little "safe".

Traditionally in Paper Mario games, you would enter a new chapter and it would have a main theme and a loosely related dungeon. The chapter would have to run with that one idea. Here, you could allow a story to still be told throughout the chapter, but it could take a place across many areas. Despite the fact that there was no connected map, the world did feel real. As such, the level variety in this game was a series best, and the overall pace of the game was very strong as well.

(Spoilers on these levels in the next paragraph).

The levels that stood out to me were the Dark Bloo Inn, The Golden Coliseum, The Sunset Express, pretty much all of the Fortune Island Voyage, Fort Cobalt, Cobalt Base, Sacred Forest, Mossrock Theater, and of course the Green Energy Plant. Many of these levels were not standard at all, and I loved the change in pace of each one.

Another thing I really liked about the game was the actual design of the levels. One thing this game and The Origami King later on both do better than the original trilogy is build an explorable world. Outside of the original Paper Mario, the first 3 games did have a tendency to overuse hallways a bit. It's something you don't always stop and notice in TTYD because that game is still quite engaging in other ways, but I do appreciate how Color Splash differed in this aspect.

Many didn't like the idea of a paint hammer, but in my mind, it was one of things that really took advantage of the fact that this is a Mario game. The colorless spots across each level incentivized players to explore the world, and that desire to finish painting Prism Island is actually what got me into most of my fights. Many I would try to avoid, but some I wouldn't be able to. These fights also at least gave your paint hammer more capacity as the game went on as well, still giving you some incentive to do them.

Levels could also be more vertical, and ironically, there were "Rescue Squad" Toads to rescue throughout the game that also incentivized exploration. These Toads frequently had a fun one liner, and they would help you later in your adventure and sometimes hint you on where you need to go next.

"Things" were still a part of this game like in Sticker Star, but they were a lot more tolerable this time around. The puzzles seemed less cryptic and the Toads at the Port Prisma docks were a massive help if you ever felt stuck. Often you could get an item you needed in the level you were supposed to use it in, which was nice. But there were still some occasions where the backtracking could be annoying (most notably having to redo The Cobalt Base for the secret prize).

The worst instance of backtracking came in Kiwano Temple - one of the weaker / slower levels in the game. Many of these levels had multiple exits like in Super Mario World, where Paint Star color would indicate which direction / chapter the exit would lead to. I was fine with this and even felt that many levels utilized alternative exits in interesting ways - this could be to use a prior level to open up a new part of a map later on after acquiring some new Things / Paint Stars, or simply to create a shortcut on the world map.

The issue with Kiwano Temple in particular was that the exits were placed right on top of each other at the end of a very slow paced dungeon that featured some depth perception issues at times. So this definitely wasn't a highlight in my eyes.

Speaking of world map shortcuts, they could come in use. But not really in a good news kind of way. Another lowlight of this game was the presence of a Shy Bandit, a Shy Guy who can actually delete the progress you had painting a level. In my first playthroughs I never had a problem with this character and felt that he wasn't a big deal, but in my recent one, I had two encounters where it was just not possible to run across the world map to stop him from draining color from a level in time. Luckily I wasn't going for 100% completion in this run, but it made me realize that this was a pretty lame addition for no reason.

This game seems to have a weird fascination with instant death chase sequences as well. I avoided most since I was prepared in my later playthroughs, but it can be kind of annoying. It feels hard to die, so this seems like the game's way of giving you a game over. At the very least, there tends to be a save block right before each instant death experience.

This applies in battles too, where not having the right Thing sticker doesn't just make a fight really hard like in Sticker Star, it turns the bosses into downright impossible to beat entities. This does distract from how shallow the combat really is, admittedly. I think the paint / color effect for enemies is cool to show how much HP is left, but I definitely miss the days where each Paper Mario enemy had a rather low amount of HP. It felt more like a game of strategy back then rather than a guessing game.

Unlike Sticker Star, charm is definitely here, but I won't lie, I don't understand why the Toads couldn't just have more unique designs. It's like they remembered part of what made the original games such a joy to exist in the world of, but only went halfway on addressing what Sticker Star was lacking.

It is frustrating to me. The game had potential to be really good, but it just skips out on the things that I would call necessary for a Paper Mario game - like an interesting story. These misses hold me back on giving it the praise that many newer fans would like to see from a big TTYD fan. As much as I want to say that Paper Mario is great like it used to be, I can't say that and feel like I'm being honest about it.

The writing in Color Splash wasn't really good as much as it was funny - the game makes you smile a lot, and more than the originals at that. After a while though, you realize that all the NPCs seem to be used as punchlines, and it makes the world feel less serious as a result. While it doesn't result in good world-building, I will admit that I still read every single Toad's dialogue from the largest rescue team upon each replay, and always chuckle at a few lines.

Humor is a very important part of these games given their heavy emphasis on text, but I think weirdly the game having a story creates a much more balanced set of NPCs where the genuinely funny characters feel like they aren't actually just trying too hard to be funny. This type of balance would be preferred.

I know a lot of completionists hate the Roshambo Temples, and perhaps there are too many of them. But admittedly, I felt like they were pretty cute for side content. It always made sense for a Paper Mario game, and weirdly it felt less in your face about the game being "paper" than other aspects of these games.

I think that covers just about everything. Overall, this is a mixed bag. There's a lot of bad here, but I would argue much more good is present, that just did not exist in Sticker Star. For those newer Paper Mario fans out there, yes I am a TTYD fan, but I've now willingly played this game 3 times. That has to count for something.

I will always want to bring up the good with this game - really, the game has so many memorable moments, and I think that is why I have many lasting memories with it. But I also have to bring up the disclaimer every time I hype the game up: it could have been so much more.

I have mentioned before that while I want Paper Mario to go back to being a RPG, there are things from this game I would like to see in this new hypothetical RPG. This includes the strong variety of places you go to, the pacing, exploration, and even humor. But the reason why it's not the other way around (a game like Color Splash with TTYD elements) is because where Color Splash goes wrong, it goes very wrong, and it just didn't have to be this way. It had a great template to build off of, and it chose to ignore the formula entirely.

Paper Mario: Color Splash was Sticker Star done right. Which is still a game that is far from perfect, but a game that is still worth talking about and potentially playing even in 2023 as I write this. Despite all it did right though, it will never truly be able to escape my constant thoughts about how it could've easily been so much better. For that, it gets a middle score, but not because the game is mid tier in any way. It is simply just the average of the good and the bad. It's a worthwhile time, and perhaps even underrated. But there will always be questions about why the game is how it is, and those questions are sadly more than warranted.

For the first time ever, I skipped a Pokemon generation. Generation 8, that is. I didn't really want to, but it just looked...boring. A lot of people seemed to verify that I made the right decision. I thought I was going to do the same thing here to be honest, but when I saw all of the trailers, I saw promise.

My return to the Pokemon series actually started early when I caved and bought Legends Arceus. It was a surprisingly fantastic time. Enough that when I saw that a lot of elements from that game would be present in Scarlet & Violet, it made me want to play again. Had this been just another crack at the old Pokemon formula, I would not have tried it. But I saw a main series Pokemon game that was an open world adventure, featuring no tall grass / random encounters, that allowed you to just play how you wanted to play. That sounded great to me. The game would even go on to be reasonably fun. So why exactly did it fall quite a distance away from greatness?

Well, there were a lot of things in the way. It would be easy to me to start by listing the performance issues the game has. It is true that these issues are present and that it is absolutely embarrassing for a franchise like Pokemon to have these issues. But I don't want to make my review about that, but rather what the game tried to be. The only impact these issues will have on my score is that I won't give the game the benefit of the doubt if I am on the fence on my rating.

I bought this game because of Pokemon Legends Arceus. What I think made me enjoy that game so much was the fact that it actually was an immersive adventure. I ended up caring about the world because I felt like a character with a unique goal of filling out the first Pokedex. (which was actually reasonable in this game!) I felt like I was part of a dangerous and hostile world, which kind of makes sense in a world full of wild animals.

Generation 9 felt like it took some of that, but took some of it away as well. Despite the fact that Generation 9 had a true open world and Legends didn't, the world of Legends somehow felt more believable. The story was more focused for one, but also just the laws of the game world made more sense. Legends wasn't really a JRPG - it was an action adventure with JRPG elements. When you lost all of your Pokemon in that game, you didn't faint. You were just defenseless in a world full of animals that could attack you. That felt real. In that game if you were battling a wild Pokemon, nearby friends of it might join in and make battles even tougher.

The immersion in Violet feels completely shattered the second you realize that there is a set of rules the game has to play by. I can't tell you how many times other wild Pokemon would watch my battles, just to immediately leap at me after my fight ended. Like, these are wild Pokemon, are they not? Why would they wait patiently for your battle to end when they could all just jump you at once? Why can't the player move around or even bail on these wild encounters on their own accord? Couldn't you throw a Poke Ball without initiating a battle?

There are obvious reasons why this all didn't happen here. That's not what main series Pokemon is. However, I think if this is true, perhaps Pokemon is not fit to be this type of game.

I will still say that I think the game was better for being this type of game. Trying to fill out the Pokedex doesn't feel like a waste of time when you can actually see what you are engaging in before you go into the fight. This just makes for less randomized gameplay, and it actually turned me away from pre-determined trainer battles in favor of wild encounters. The beauty of this system is that you no longer have to play a linear path and potential replayability usually opens up when games make decisions like this.

Unfortunately, I think there was a missed opportunity in this regard because while the game doesn't really stop you from choosing the order you want to go in, it still does have an intended route. I think this was a bad decision.

Some battles in my playthrough were quite tough, while others were braindead easy. This is because the order I went in disagreed with the intended route of the devs. This slightly defeats the purpose of having an open world game.

I understand that it can be a lot of work to make a game that is more adaptive, but I think that GameFreak should be able to pull this off. There were many different challenges throughout the game between the gyms, titans, and star raids. I think it should've been pretty easy to make a tiered system where the game evaluates how strong the player should be based on how many things they have completed. If a player loses to a gym leader that has a Maschiff and come back later with more badges, perhaps the leader would then have a Mabosstiff at a higher level. Not only would this prevent players from cheesing certain fights, it would make the game feel like more of a real place where other trainers get stronger as you progress too.

One of the things that made The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild work so well was the flexibility that the game gave you. While some areas in that game were more challenging than others, you would always have the necessary tools to beat any challenge because the game gave you those resources quite early in the game.

Scarlet & Violet had the opportunity to do the exact same thing, with the academy acting as the end of the tutorial. However, they locked certain travelling features behind the defeat of Titan Pokemon, which kind of felt like a bunch of unnecessary barriers. They locked one of the hardest Titans behind the surfing ability, which makes sense: harder challenges should be later in the game. But had they used an adaptive levelling system, this would not have been an issue and players could've just chose the order they wanted, which was a large purpose of changing the game to be how it is.

Passing by an area that you can't access yet interrupts the flow of this type of game, for no good reason. To gain these new abilities, Miraidon apparently just needs to eat a bite of a sandwich, which is part of a cutscene that plays about five different times with little variation. Like... really now? That's what it takes for you to be able to suddenly jump higher? This made me miss the Ride Pokemon from Arceus further - it made not having access to abilities less insulting because in those cases, you just didn't have a relationship with the appropriate ride Pokemon yet. I also felt that the actual ride mechanics were more smooth in Arceus as well.

Ironically, one of the glitches made the game better. This was Miraidon's ability to scale tall mountains with slight inclines, if you made him face the wall backwards. This was extremely useful and acted as a way to get me to the place I wanted to be more than a handful of times. The glide ability felt incredibly underwhelming because it just made executing this glitch more annoying, on top of just being worse than the fly from Legends. Additionally, water travel felt incredibly laggy.

I don't think the forced linearity really did anything to help the game. I understand that it is hard to make a story with adaptive level scaling and the ability to go where you want when you want, but they didn't even take advantage of this forced linearity. If you are going to make some things happen in order, at least have a plot related reason to do so.

It was hard to get hooked on this game until the very end because it didn't feel like much was happening to drive the plot. Having multiple different quests was cool and allowed you to take breaks from each quest while still progressing, but because the story of the game is largely dependent on all of those quests being finished, almost all of the uniqueness to the story of the game comes at the end where it just comes across as shoehorned in. I would've appreciated more of an effort to make the middle of the game more engaging, and like I mentioned earlier with all the different objectives, I think they could've found some set times to potentially introduce new things to the narrative, or to change the world a little.

I still did appreciate what they tried to do with the ending, but it did feel a little bit weird. The game is mainly open world with just a bunch of different tasks all at once. It didn't really embrace that. Rather, they decided thay they needed to fit a full Pokemon story in the last hour after the normal gameplay instead of building the story around said gameplay.

The ending was a cool premise but came across as a homework assignment that was started five minutes before the deadline. It did not even feel real, and I think it doesn't make up for what I saw as a less than engaging main game.

Because they were limited on what the story could be, they really tried to make the characters themselves memorable. This cast of gym leaders felt like the most unique yet, though ironically, the one whose quirk was that he is pretty boring compared to the rest was the one that stood out the most as the most interesting. The Elite Four was also a pleasant surprise, I'm not going to lie. The first member in particular made a strong impression that I find quite rare in Pokemon games, let alone ones from the modern era.

I was not very impressed by the Team Star bosses. At the end of these sections they really tried to introduce the backstory of these characters, but I think one thing they do not realize is that I really don't care about characters I just met five minutes ago. These characters wait in their section the entire game for you to appear, you beat them, and then their scene plays. They might as well be ordinary trainers to the player, but the game treats them as extra important. It does not feel earned. I immediately remember feeling this way about Lily early in Generation 7. When a game tries hard to show a character is important, it almost makes you naturally dismissive. Genuine care about a character in almost any form of media typically happens because you realize that you like the character in some way - not because you feel you are supposed to like them.

Comparatively to X/Y, the friend group ended up being somewhat likeable in my opinion. I was especially surprised to really like Arven by the end of the game - he is handled in almost the opposite way of the star captains, I think.

The exception to liking the main supporting cast was Nemona; she felt like perhaps the most one dimensional rival yet. Rivals are supposed to be battling rivals of course, but when thinking back to characters like Silver, Barry, Bianca, and Hugh, all wildly different rivals for that matter, they all had a personality trait that made them who they were. Nemona's quirk was that she really liked battling. That is completely uninteresting for a rival. Like yes, that was her purpose for existing. It's practically a prerequisite to being a rival. She just doesn't feel like a real character as such. Just a robot that was programmed to do and say certain things, or an AI that really wants to tell you how much it likes battling Pokemon.

One of my other complaints is a quick one: targeting Pokemon on the overworld was infuriating at times. I would look directly at them, press the button, and nothing would appear. Having a feature to tell you which Pokemon you have already caught is great, especially in games where trying to complete the Pokedex doesn't feel like a waste of time. I just wish the feature was accessible 100% of the time, and it isn't because of how picky the camera / ZL is.

I also thought the auto battle mechanic was pretty pointless. This would be one of those things that is a harmless addition, maybe even good for specific players (like shiny hunters apparently), but they forced you to use it in the Team Star hideout areas. They just felt like such a waste of time. I understand they needed more things for the map, but there are better ways to utilize the map than forcing players to use a weird mechanic just to justify development time spent on it.

Terastalizing was another gimmick that I wasn't super in to, but it was better than Z-moves or Dynamaxing. The monotype thing was interesting, and at least trying to explain the idea in the late/postgame made the game a little bit more memorable. Frankly, I wish they had just kept mega evolutions still, but that's just me.

One other comment that doesn't fit anywhere else, but probably needs to be said: this is just about the most underwhelmed I've ever been by a Pokemon soundtrack. There were very few memorable songs, and a lot of the themes you just have to get right were misses for me, notably the gym battle theme.

I'm really torn. I would be lying if I said the game was never fun, or that it didn't do anything that I wanted the series to try. There is an interview that the game has your player take in the late game, where they ask you a question that is a layup for the main character: Do you like Pokemon?

Frustratingly, I sat at the screen and had to think about it for a little bit. It's complicated really. It is possible to care about something and be disappointed still, or feel that it could be so much more. I don't say it out of pleasure, but the series has fell off a cliff since the end of Generation 5. I understand that going from the DS to a home console is a hard change to make and makes living up to your potential harder. I just don't buy that a franchise like Pokemon can't get there.

The good news is that I think the series is actually on an upswing again. I had more fun with this game than Generation 7, the last games I played. I think I liked it more than X/Y too, though it was close.

I actually appreciate that Generation 9 tried to be something different from the games that came before it and a lot of the changes it made I think should be series staples moving forward. However, I don't think it is there yet. And that's okay. Everything needs work. Some good foundational pieces were established here, and I do think there is a lot room for improvement. At the very least, I am a little bit interested to see what happens next now.