Tl;dr: Brings S/V's main issues front and center and adds more issues, but in a more interesting map and with more enjoyable battles.
Mostly fine. Story's somewhat interesting, the few new Pokemon are fine. Music is good, as always. All the returning Pokemon and the new Pokemon look good, as do all the characters. The only village is actually fairly detailed, if not actually nice to look at. The world is still pretty ugly, but it does feel more interesting to explore with its smaller area and a more compact, interesting design.
Unfortunately, the DLC seems to perform worse than the base game on average in my experience. Way more stutters and frame drops than I ever had in the base game, to the point that a few times I actually started getting a bit sick. There seems to be a memory leak or something, as the performance gets worse the longer the game is open; resetting it can fix a few of the more prominent issues for a bit.
It doesn't help that the DLC makes some weird decisions. It's accessible from the start, meaning that you can access it within the first 3 or so hours of playing the game. To make it enticing for players who have already beaten the game, they made the areas scale with your in-game progress (if only the main game had something like that...), but it's in a bit of an odd way. See, the first area has levels right around the first member of the Elite 4 (assuming you've beaten the game). This means that, having beaten the post-game events and such, my team was still about 20 levels too high despite the scale. To remedy this, I made a new team exclusively from catching Pokemon in the DLC area. This was probably the most enjoyable part of the experience, just using a bunch of different mons. However, by the end of the DLC, opposing trainers' Pokemon have scaled up much faster than my own - where I'm level 60, they're level 70.
It feels like they really didn't know how to try to tackle level scaling, and so they did it in a way that I can't say I found especially enjoyable. I enjoyed that it was certainly more challenging than usual, with several of the trainers' teams actually having items and competent movesets. But the level scaling felt really off. If you come in after beating the main game, you're presented at first with a bunch of Pokemon that you will breeze through for a few boring hours until you get to something somewhat close to your level. If you make a new team instead, it won't scale up "properly" with the opponents. If you come in during the main story, you're going to end up massively overleveled for wherever you were in the main story. I'm struggling to figure out what audience they were trying to satisfy with this.
The cutscenes are still cool, but still are fully mouthed as if they were going to have voice acting. A lot of the quests require you to go back and forth a lot, it's really tedious and frustrating. The open world feels pointless with the story of the DLC being very linear, and I just found myself annoyed with it.
I did really like the new characters Carmine and Kieran. I really enjoyed that battles felt tougher, there were several where I came down to my last Pokemon and it felt really cool - back and forth battles that almost reminded me of watching the anime. But ultimately this was just pretty underwhelming. Releasing 10 months after the main game and having worse technical performance without really any improvement elsewhere to make up for it was... Disappointing. I can't say I hated my time with this, but I didn't really enjoy it either.
Mostly fine. Story's somewhat interesting, the few new Pokemon are fine. Music is good, as always. All the returning Pokemon and the new Pokemon look good, as do all the characters. The only village is actually fairly detailed, if not actually nice to look at. The world is still pretty ugly, but it does feel more interesting to explore with its smaller area and a more compact, interesting design.
Unfortunately, the DLC seems to perform worse than the base game on average in my experience. Way more stutters and frame drops than I ever had in the base game, to the point that a few times I actually started getting a bit sick. There seems to be a memory leak or something, as the performance gets worse the longer the game is open; resetting it can fix a few of the more prominent issues for a bit.
It doesn't help that the DLC makes some weird decisions. It's accessible from the start, meaning that you can access it within the first 3 or so hours of playing the game. To make it enticing for players who have already beaten the game, they made the areas scale with your in-game progress (if only the main game had something like that...), but it's in a bit of an odd way. See, the first area has levels right around the first member of the Elite 4 (assuming you've beaten the game). This means that, having beaten the post-game events and such, my team was still about 20 levels too high despite the scale. To remedy this, I made a new team exclusively from catching Pokemon in the DLC area. This was probably the most enjoyable part of the experience, just using a bunch of different mons. However, by the end of the DLC, opposing trainers' Pokemon have scaled up much faster than my own - where I'm level 60, they're level 70.
It feels like they really didn't know how to try to tackle level scaling, and so they did it in a way that I can't say I found especially enjoyable. I enjoyed that it was certainly more challenging than usual, with several of the trainers' teams actually having items and competent movesets. But the level scaling felt really off. If you come in after beating the main game, you're presented at first with a bunch of Pokemon that you will breeze through for a few boring hours until you get to something somewhat close to your level. If you make a new team instead, it won't scale up "properly" with the opponents. If you come in during the main story, you're going to end up massively overleveled for wherever you were in the main story. I'm struggling to figure out what audience they were trying to satisfy with this.
The cutscenes are still cool, but still are fully mouthed as if they were going to have voice acting. A lot of the quests require you to go back and forth a lot, it's really tedious and frustrating. The open world feels pointless with the story of the DLC being very linear, and I just found myself annoyed with it.
I did really like the new characters Carmine and Kieran. I really enjoyed that battles felt tougher, there were several where I came down to my last Pokemon and it felt really cool - back and forth battles that almost reminded me of watching the anime. But ultimately this was just pretty underwhelming. Releasing 10 months after the main game and having worse technical performance without really any improvement elsewhere to make up for it was... Disappointing. I can't say I hated my time with this, but I didn't really enjoy it either.