This entry of the series I was very skeptical about since this looked to be a huge departure from the original Pokemon formula, and the ambition from what the first trailer had shown had me cautiously excited for this title. I skipped out on Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, due to growing very tired of the Pokemon formula after Sword and Shield and its expansions, and had thought about skipping out on Legends also but previews of the game had started to appear about two weeks before the game came out and it had looked amazing from what I could see. It was something that I was hoping that would happen to the Pokemon series for a while. Have something that is single-player focused while also remaining true to the original series. The Let's Go games were going in the right direction for me, but fell for me in the controls, lack of battling outside of trainer battles and it's post game with all of the master trainers. Legends Arceus makes major changes to the Pokemon games that I do wish won't go away and that Game Freak would take a look at what they had created and refine what they made for the inevitable follow-ups. Major changes that I had immediately noticed (other than the open world, I'll get to that later) was the changes to battles/flow of battle. Random encounters are entirely gone from this entry, the player is now able to select what fights they would like to take on which I think is a major plus. Battles are now also instantaneous as they are both initiated and take place within the level the player is in. Commands are selected very quickly and attack animations are both nice looking and fast to boot, speeding up the flow of battles overall. That is not even mentioning the way the turn order works now as it is now not who has the higher speed stat, but instead who strikes first and the use of moves/alterations to moves that can change the turn order. Moves in previous games that, for example, only buffed special attack, have now been modified to boost both attack and special attack the same goes for defense and special defense, status effects have been changed across the board, Pokemon no longer have abilities (at least visibly in game, Seribi still lists abilities but not sure), moves can be changed from the inventory menu, evolving a pokemon has been changed to better suit people who want to keep their un-evolved pokemon till the end of the game, and the move pool has been shortened to take into account the new way the game is played. Speaking of which, the game is now open-level, allowing the player to select a level and either battle, catch, or explore the five different areas that they game has to offer. Each area has differing climate, terrain and pokemon, so that it does not get stale. Not once during my nearly 55 hour adventure did I once get bored while playing the game. While it is not the prettiest game out there, just walking around the looking at the environments, and what the wild pokemon are doing was a fun thing to do for me. The characters and story in this game are also very good this time around too, I saw myself actually getting to know and liking the cast of characters, possibly due to the story not being the same as it as is has always been in the mainline pokemon games. Minor complaints that I have about the game are some of the weird ways that some of the new forms of Pokemon evolve, such as Stantler, who needs to do a certain move 20 times in order to evolve. Some of the sidequests do leave something to be desired, as most of them are glorified fetch quests, which is something that the player should be doing anyway. The main village I feel is a little to big as navigating it could be a little annoying at times due to how fast the player character moves. Those minor nitpicks aside, this game was a fun little surprise at the start of the 2022, hopefully this will launch another game series of Pokemon games that can co-exist along with the main series of RPGs, because I would like to see more.