Really creative level design and theming. Quite challenging, but never felt unfair. Controls are substantially more intuitive than DKC Returns (at least the 3DS version), and it works to its benefit. DKCR felt harder, but it's harder to tell whether it's just the difference in inertia/weightiness. The boss battles are pretty rough and tedious, though - many of them follow the old "wait for the right moment to attack" pattern, which is never fun. All in all, I think Rayman Legends is still my favorite modern, large studio platformer, but this is pretty dang good.

DK has crazy amounts of inertia in this game, the most I've ever seen in a 2D platformer. That means that every move you make counts, and you may not be able to avert a catastrophe that you can see coming from pretty far away, because your earlier decision of moving quickly prevents you from stopping on a dime. This can be really frustrating, but it can also allow for some fantastic momentum when things DO work. Levels are well designed for it too. Ultimately this "heavy inertia" style of platforming just isn't my favorite, but it is still not something I've really seen done anywhere else. So while it will likely never be in my top platformers, I can see myself getting cravings to play it in the future, which is commendable in and of itself.

Pros:
- Pokemon design is very good this around.
- The game has a fair bit of humor that will land even for older players (the brothers in the post game are great)
- The game shows some imagination.
Cons:
- That imagination is never even close to realized because everything is so lackluster.
- The story is complete nonsense and the pacing is as rote as you can get: Shuffle along from one town to the next to do the gym, with nothing else interesting happening.
- Dynamax is a terrible gimmick; you just dynamax when the opponent does, no questions asked, and it legitimately adds another full minute of time onto the battle just to watch the overly slow animations unfold.
- The game is really, really, really easy.

It just feels like the absolute distillation of Pokemon down to its most basic; but it's always been the extra little bits of world building that made Pokemon special to me. It's unfortunate because there are still moments where that Pokemon charm shines through, but it feels like they did the absolute minimum they could to rush the game out the door. There are real improvements, but they feel like the bare minimum for where Pokemon should be right now, not an excellent Pokemon game.

Bottom line, I could see how some folks would love the game. But it's not a strong enough package relative to the point in time where it was released to be meaningful, and Pokemon has been on that downward trend for a long time. So I'm not sure this would be the weakest entry in the series if someone played them all back to back today; for the first time; but given that I've seen the series' ups and downs, this just doesn't cut it anymore. Weakest gen in my book because of it.

Looks amazing graphically. But there are way too many moments where enemies come in quickly off the screen, or where hit boxes seemed juuuust a bit imprecise, and the camera pans in a way that I found disorienting at times. Mine cart levels and other gimmicky levels were probably my favorite part. Definitely a solid game overall, but not even in the same league as Super Mario World or Yoshi's Island to me, so I don't see myself coming back to it. Hoping the sequels catch my attention a bit more.