the focus on land and sea really pays off in the route design in this game, with tons of diverse and beautiful environments. the soot-covered plain, the rainy river valley with tall grass, the blistering desert, deep trenches beneath the sea. colors are so vibrant and the way sprites are drawn with big chunks of color makes the game look like a cartoon. there's many cool "next-gen" effects like footsteps in the sand, reflections and shadows in the water, and logs that buckle under your feet.

so, great audio, great visuals, great new set of monsters. double battles are much more interesting than single battles, although contests are more interesting than both. the battle frontier is where most of the challenge in battles appears. dungeons tend to be short and simple, though there are a few good puzzles in gyms. the legendary pokemon storyline doesn't do much to mix up the same old structure of pokemon league and enemy team. 8 HMs is too damn many HMs.

as much as i love the aesthetics of this game, it's easy to see why this is the point where a lot of original fans fell off. a lot of the interesting rough edges of the prior games have been sanded off, and yet the grindiness has somehow increased. this game is constantly throwing new time sinks at you just in case catching them all wasn't enough. it leaves the main quest feeling a little underbaked, because i'm supposed to get sucked into the postgame world of planting berries and making pokeblocks and rebattling trainers and breeding pokemon and winning battle points. i beat the elite four with only four real pokemon and an HM mule, because raising a full team of six would have been too tedious.