Sometimes it's great to just stop for a moment and float there. Not necessarily even to stop and catch your breath and repair after a tough battle, sometimes just to take in the scene and enjoy where you are.

Every piece of music is great and fits your situation pretty well, and there's a lot of music! Nice to have as you assemble a ship and crew worthy of your journey.

The only real problem is that it takes quite a while to unlock things, which is a bigger problem when you lose your save. Oh well...

Well, it has the worst main story of a mainline Pokemon game, the worst execution of said story, and the post-game scenario has two of the most worthless and annoying characters in the series. In spite of that, there are some things I liked, including the towns, the fashion, the generic NPC trainers, the gym leaders, and some of the supporting characters and their personal storylines (Marnie, Vyers, Bede, and Sonia, in particular). Some cool locales with cool Pokemon in them, too.

Admittedly, some of these things I appreciate more in hindsight after SV, but still...

My favorite track in the game is Sonia's theme by far, it's so nice. There's a lot of nice character themes and battle themes, too. On the other hand the gym battle starts out good but then the crowd starts chanting and it becomes much less enjoyable.

The Wild Area and Gigantamax were just okay, I could have done without the Wild Area and would've been fine with just a linear experience. I was weirdly annoyed at how all the non-special Fighting-types were pure Fighting type. Also, Shield rates a tiny bit lower than Sword purely because Zamazenta is just that much less useful than his sis Zacian. Like seriously, who thought to introduce Body Press this gen and not give it to him until the next?

One of the best adventure games ever, when you play with a walkthrough, that is. It has some of the best voice acting, characters, music, atmosphere, design for an adventure game and a story I love. But, even for it's time, the puzzle design reached a new height of ridiculousness. Some puzzles are fun, some aren't at all, and overall it's better to just swallow your pride and have a guide handy.

It's sad that it's impossible to ignore this flaw that would have sunk a lesser game. At the same time, I think it says a lot to the strength of the game's elements overall that it can survive it's main gameplay being flawed.