I try not to be negative too often but just thinking about this game makes me either annoyed or disappointed. The Pokemon selection is good and mega evolution is the best transformation/super mechanic we've seen, but everything else is just bland at best and painful at worst. I know story should never be the main takeaway from a mainline Pokemon game, but the story and its characters just found new ways to make me annoyed with it each and every time they popped up. All of the 'friends' are bad, Team Flare is no good, the story is no good as a whole and the main rival trying to plant moral gray into the story at the very end after Team Flare was dealt with was the most ridiculous thing I've seen in a Pokemon game. Mega evolution, the game's main mechanic of interest, is only ever used three times throughout the entirety of the story, and one of those times is in the tutorial for it. Sure, that makes sense lore-wise since you're trying to figure out its secrets, but you are also doing that same kind of thing in Sword/Shield, and you use Dynamax in every gym battle alone in that game. Coming off of the fun gameplay and interesting Pokemon stories of Platinum, BW and BW2, this was a giant pain in my side.