This game's a joke. I understand the direction they're trying to take the series in, but this is half-baked. The best I can even do is give them the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to being incredibly rushed. I feel bad for the devs, but nothing but animosity for the leadership at Game Freak. Even with mismanagement factored in, it's still hard to ignore how uninspired and creatively bankrupt this series is. And this isn't a new problem.

The frustrating thing is that the performance of this game, as bad as it is, will be used as a scapegoat to defend it's poor design. "If it weren't for the glitches and lag, it'd be great!". That's a load, this game is bad. People are just desperate for anything fresh in this series. I guess if you get bored enough of chess, scattering the pieces on the floor is a welcome surprise.

Pokémon is still incredibly dated and slow, even for an RPG. They've never addressed the glacial pace at which things happen in these games. Every action in a battle is pain, stat changes, weather reports, attacks, switching, using items, there's so many unnecessary pauses and delays. And in the overworld the game frequently interrupts you with unnecessary cutscenes and dialogue that still lacks skipping in a modern era. The trainer AI still can't switch, use items, or strategize. Gym leaders still have 3 Pokémon. There's so many technical issues and small experiential thorns on this experience, mistakes an amature developer wouldn't make that hurt game feel and waste your time further. I could list them for hours, I'll spare you and myself.

None of this is news for this series, it's just worth noting none of it is addressed here in SV, and playing it is like grinding your teeth on sandpaper. Worse yet they've removed a number of QoL options that used to exist to help ease that pain, including battle animation and switch mode toggles. There also continues to be no difficulty options.

Moving on to what's new, most of it's ideas are simply worse incarnations of better ideas from older games:

The movement and realtime battles/capturing, which is better handled in Arceus ( which is also a terrible game, people defending that tire-fire are bafflingly in-denial, it's a weird toy I can excuse if it were 15 bucks, not a AAA title ).

An artistic direction that's been on a downhill spiral since SuMo, bucking stylistic shaders and hand tailored lighting for a PBR stack that looks bad, and likely was laborious to update and apply to every individual Pokémon. (This may help to account for the even further cut-down dex). I'll only briefly mention the continued decline in Pokémon designs as well. Instead I'm more interested in calling out some of the most hideous, generic, and poorly masked heightmaps I've ever seen in a game. From any distance all you see is spaghettified vertices and egregiously tiling textures masked by 0 ambiance or atmospherics. It's embarrassing. There's almost 0 bespoke or interesting landmarks to dot this mess and add character, either.

"Boss" encounters which still merely amount to normal Pokémon with larger healthbars, even SuMo at least had bosses with adds. Pokémon remains an RPG lacking any true unique bosses or encounters.

Another new gimmick that while mechanically functional, is embarrassing to look at relative to Megas or Dynamax. It's underutilized by in-game NPC's who always Terastallize on the last turn, and predictably always into their signature type, removing any surprise or challenge.

Gym fights that try to ape on sword and shields presentation and music, but are less exciting. We also continue to miss out on Gym rooms / puzzles in lieu of "tests" that often lack battles.

The openness results in 0 incentive to fight trainers, I fought none in my entire run. They stand out in the middle of nowhere and have no mechanical recourse to lock you into battles.

On top of the aforementioned pointless trainers, there's no dungeons or battle gauntlets that test your resolve, offer opportunities for puzzles, or any sense of isolation or tension anywhere in this large open world. You'll find more of that in Gen1 than here. I miss routes, forests, caves, victory roads. I don't need more of those exact things, but something that can fill the gaping void that is the lack of tension.

Half baked new QoL features like auto-heal, which while a nice time saver cannot relieve status ailments or revive Pokémon for some reason.

It's hard to think what advancements this game brings to the series other than just cracking open the progression. It does very little with this new structure, there's almost no interesting ramifications of the open world. You'd hope that unlocking a new movement option for your mount would be at the least as exciting as acquiring a new HM in past generations, but impressively enough acquiring HM's in Gold & Silver is genuinely more exciting and opens more exploration options then learning to climb in SV.

Game Freak brought 0 innovative or inspired new ideas to the Pokémon formula here. They simply tacked on the barest implementation of ideas fans have been naively calling on for years.

Gameplay aside, the narrative elements of this game are incredibly confusing. The academy framing this game is hung on is pretty lame, limits the games plot, denies player expression (gotta wear your uniform!), and to top things off, it's hilariously ill-fitting for the first open world Pokémon game. It's like oil and water, They created a game about going to an academy which once left you will never think about or return to. It doesn't help that the school is simply a large segmented hall of tutorials full of load screens. They could have made an open world game focused around an academy entirely, where the school and surrounding grounds are the focus of the entire plot. Think Hogwarts in some of the better Harry Potter games.

Instead, as it is, the entire idea should have been scrapped as it has a number of awful knock-on effects. It somehow results in the worst opening 2 hours in a series known for awful openings, nothing but exposition and text boxes establishing a setting you never want to re-visit. The school setting also results in the least impactful and most pathetic enemy team in any entry in this series. Team Star is so inconsequential and annoying I tried to go out of my way to ignore their questline until the game forced me to in order to see the ending. Their flaccid plot tries to get you to empathize with a plight that is never even shown. These horrible bullies that apparently incentivized team Star to form are never named nor seen, why should we care. They clearly think the bit with the headmaster being in disguise is a lot funnier than it is, too.

The baffling part of all this, is that there is an interesting story buried in SV, and it's Arven's. The game suddenly gets interesting and has stakes in it's very last hour. I was surprised! Unfortunately, the academy, Team Star, and even the journey to becoming champion have 0 cohesion with this plotline. They are 100% isolated from one-another, and don't build on one-another naturally, resulting in a whiplash of an ending that is cool but unearned. It's a shame, too, because the dynamic portrayed between the main cast in that last hour shows real potential. The team has chemistry. It's to bad none of these characters had time to mingle prior to this point, and that they couldn't have arrived at this point due to some sort of aligned goals or principles, as apposed to convenient contrivance.

There's so much missed potential in the mystery of the paradox Pokémon. They should have been running amok across the region, intersecting with every plot and impacting the lives of the characters. This should have been the main thrust of this story, and would have placed Arven center stage as the only one who seemed to have even the slightest idea what was going on. Team star could have been re-framed as a group of students who shirked class duties to help people in need because of the crisis or something. Perhaps Nemona, the gym leaders, and the league could have been struggling to maintain normalcy despite the crisis. The source of terrestrialization should have been a much greater source of mystery and controversy, too. It's simply a much more interesting story.

In the end, this is all to little to late. All the plots come off as jokes and then ask me to take them seriously at the eleventh hour. It almost works. But almost is almost. And despite that, it can't make up for what is otherwise a sloppy, gruelingly slow, uninspired, barely functioning, and clearly rushed experience that once again lowers the bar for a series who's bar is already on the ground. This is less than the bare minimum effort.

The only excuse for giving this drivel the time of day is if nostalgia has hewn a Pokémon shaped hole in your Pokémon shaped heart, as it has mine.

BotW came out on the same system, 5 years ago.

I pirated this game. Stop buying them.