This feels like such an innovation-adjacent game. It's like, you see the Switch come out with Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, which were pretty big steps forward for their respective series, so the Switch gains a reputation for featuring innovative new games in long running series. And then, half a decade later, this comes out with a very similar style, so it registers as "the innovative Pokemon on the innovation console".

But the more I think about it, the more I'm just not impressed by what this game has to offer. The bulk of the gameplay ends up being just sneaking up on some Pokemon and capturing them. Eventually, every encounter blurs into one generic process of either stealthily throwing a ball at their backs or sending out a Pokemon to hit them a bit and then throw the ball in usual Pokemon fare. Actual battles are scarce, and rarely even have more than one Pokemon (the noble fights were laughably easy too), so there's no real anchor to your power progression. Apparently there's some harder fight in the finale or whatever, but I just can't be bothered when the rest of the game ends up being a grind. Having a super easy difficulty curve with one dumb spike in the end is a typical Nintendo trick that got old three True Arenas ago, anyways.

Beyond the process of capturing Pokemon, there's nothing that really screams innovation to me. Sure, you have to worry about a tiny inventory now because I guess every Switch game just has to do that, but that doesn't really add much of anything worthwhile. Most of the focus beyond the exploration bits is just sitting through a story that's as bland and expository as the rest of the franchise. And in lieu of the endless Kanto nods, we get Sinnoh references to point at and say "Woah, the flute sound is like the intro to Gen 4! I know what that is!". Despite claiming to be a bold leap for this series, this game reminds me more than ever of how stagnant Pokemon is.

Seriously, this feels like the closest resemblance to an advancement in the main series beyond Red and Blue in 26 years, disregarding Colosseum and XD almost as much as Game Freak themselves have. It's so little of a change though, and yet it bills itself as an incredible new glimpse into the evergreen Pokemon concept. This game reminds me of the age old question "it's the most profitable series in world, why can't they do more?". But on the flip side, there was a preestablished reason this is the most profitable series in the world: Pokemon is such a universally recognizable property that the core appeal lets Nintendo sell anything. Pokemon games don't improve particularly quickly because an incredible new Pokemon game would need to sell substantially more than a typical entry to justify all that extra work, which isn't happening.

All in all, this feels like a clear reminder that no matter what the marketing tries to say, whatever new Pokemon game comes out really will just be another Pokemon game. Nothing more, nothing less.