OK, so, Donphan in the room, the technical issues. They're definitely present and noticable. For me personally, as a connoisseur of janky-ass games like Zero Escape, I'm not the kind of person to have my enjoyment affected by them, even if "the most profitable franchise in the world" should give its developers time to do actual QA. That said, I honestly don't think other aspects of the game feel that rushed at all.

First of all, as a baseline, it's Pokemon. This might be a hot take these days, but that's a pretty good thing to be! Palling around with these cute creatures and building your team in this accessible but relatively-deep JRPG framework is fun and satisfying.

The new facets of gameplay are great. A good open world is, IMO, characterised by being able to fuck around somewhere you have no right to be, and taking a risk to cheese a later-game event for an early reward. I was able to do both of those in this game, so it gets a thumbs up from me. I cannot comprehend the people who wanted this game to scale its levels to you. Have you ever heard of FF8? Oblivion? It would have been a disaster!

The multiple progression tracks, instead of having them arbitrarily and linearly interwoven, is a big winner for me too. It was great to be able to choose at my own pace when I'm sick of zipping between gyms, and go off to try another kind of challenge - with their own unique rewards. I actually found the gyms the least interesting part, because, get this - they had the least story attached.

Crazy, I know! I actually really like the writing in this game. It's no thematically deep narrative, but there's just enough going on to be interesting, and the character interactions - along with facial expressiveness - is honestly, actually, no-qualifiers good. Arven's desperate hope - almost in denial - that his injured companion can recover, Penny's blatant trans-coding, Team Star's unity in the face of being outcast, and the whole party dynamics when they come together at the end of the game - I love these idiots! There was a lot of love poured into the flavour for the school part of the game as well. And then the finale was actually a somewhat tense climax instead of a rote champion battle, complete with good old convoluted JRPG melodrama.

The multiplayer was a little disappointing - I get the impression that they couldn't do everything they wanted, because systems like the real-time, in-world battles feel made for multiplayer spectating but apparently it doesn't actually work that way. Still, just being able to hang out with friends in the same space while you do your own thing is a good time, and it does work very well with wild Pokemon, seeing each other battle and being able to share exclusives.

I dunno man! The game's good! Probably my favourite Pokemon game! I get that hating on Pokemon is the cool thing to do now because you couldn't import Scrimblo Bungus from Generation 2 into the last game but stop missing the forest for the poorly-rendered trees for just one second and actually evaluate the game on its own merits.