I don't think I properly understood before this game that game freak had given up. I had some hope left in me that they had some sort of care, that they were trying, I loved Sword and Shield, I have over 405 hours played on my main save, so I was really excited for the new games. I had a starter picked out and was ready to have the best experience playing pokemon I would ever had.

This game is possibly the most unpleasant experience I've ever had playing a game ever. I didn't finish this game for about a year, which, was exactly what happened with sword and shield, so there was still a chance I'd like it.

First off, the open world. It is literally just a big open field with a mountain, some sand, and thats about it. At least with Sonic Frontiers the grass looked nice. It's just so soulless, and possibly one of the worst things taken away. You can no longer break into random peoples houses. This actually devastated me. I miss being able to go into peoples houses and interact with them, now everyone just walks around saying stupid useless things I don't care about. Sword and Shield had it too but at least i could enter the houses. It just deprives the uniqueness of every area, every place is so soulless. I also didn't like the gym areas. They're all just ugly white buildings that stick out like a sore thumb to everything else. I know some people didn't like the swsh stadiums but at least they had something to differentiate from the other stadiums, but now they're all identical. The gym challenges aren't that great either, a big downgrade from SWSH.

Another thing I dislike is the lack of level scaling. I didn't realise that there was no level scaling and went against the ice gym leader for the 3rd gym leader and actually nearly lost my sanity fighting them. In the area before the elite four, you must go against two trainers, one which has pokemon under level ten, and one with much higher level pokemon. Why the fuck is there a trainer with level tens before the hardest challenge of the game? It makes no sense, and even the pokemon are low leveled. This is the elite four, this is victory road, its supposed to be a challenge to traverse, I was able to climb over a wall to get into it instead of taking the proper way in, and how do they prevent this? They ask you if you got in through the gate or climbed the wall, its a good thing though that pokemon fans dont lie!

Another thing is how trainers are optional, I guess they do have the challenge where you get items by doing so, but this is more of a post game thing people would do rather than the main game. And also, since everything is so open world, you can easily just jump away from pokemon, you aren't forced to fight them at all, sword and shield (with route areas) are somewhat cramped, meaning you can easily bump into them, or encounter them when going through grass, but with scarlet and violet, most can just be manuvered around, at least you're able to catch powerful pokemon rather than being hit with a "wuh oh" this pokemons too strong" from sword and shield.

I also miss routes a lot. They had more character than the empty fields of scar/viol, and were much more easier to go through. At one point in scar/viol I was struggling to find the way into the area with the last team star boss i had to defeat so i just ended up finding a ledge i could just from and used my ride pokemon to get into it another way (i may have just been a bit stupid and couldnt find my way in). It's just so much harder to traverse the map compared to previous games. I've heard arguments that because of how linear the general pokemon formula is, means it doesn't work in an open world enviornment, but honestly I think that gamefreak just really fucked this up. This game had so much potential to be something great and ended up really bad.

In short. Please, if the name game looks bad, or similar to this, do not buy it. Wait for it to come out second hand.
Smaller issues I have are:
Shinies being visible in the outer world with no sparkle or sound makes it that I cannot travel this world without the fear of missing out on a shiny, it it werent for some youtube video i had watched a few days prior i would have missed out on a shiny persian (its only difference is pink inside of ears)
Picnics want to be camping so badly. They're so terrible and unpleasant.
Also I haven't even taken into account the glitches

I hate this game so much, but I can use Fennekin again so 5/5 stars