Presented some great ideas only to not do a whole lot with them.

The story in this DLC is far simpler than the previous one. While that one focused on the backstory of the legendary, and generally made the culture of the island feel alive, this one is all about battling. In fact the actual stuff with this DLC's advertised Pokémon isn't even mentioned until the very end, feeling tacked on like the devs said "Wait! We forgot that no one will buy this without a super special legendary to catch!". I don't mind the focus on battle over story at all, as while I enjoyed the Teal Mask, battling is the main reason I play Pokémon. But while the game puts you into an academy where battling and ranks are everything, it basically just forces your character to skip all the climbing and go straight the to this academy's "elite 4". I guess it kind of makes sense given you're already a champion in your home region, but it's a let down to basically hear all about the systems in place in this school for trainers, only to be told to ignore it all and just fight these handful of strong trainers.

Weirdly the elite 4 here don't act like the conventional type - they're spread out across the map, so you can fight them at your own leisure in any order and with as much training as you like between them. And before you fight them you have to do a pre-battle trial. Sound familiar? They are literally just gym leaders from the main game. They took the gym leader challenge, halved it, and called it an elite 4. There is a champion battle at the end at least.

They do make this whole DLC stand out by making every non-wild battle be a double battle. Considering how they've been relegated to a single gym in the base game, it's nice to see them back with such a strong focus. It's unlikely you'll have any Pokémon to make use of double battles considering their previous non-existence though. Double battles mean permanent set-mode too, making the DLC generally more difficult than anything previous (and on that note there's more strategy and higher levels than anything before too).

Another huge "sounds good, but falls flat" feature is the Synchro feature. You can control the top Pokémon of your party! You can only use it in the DLC area, but other than that it's unrestricted. Sounds awesome! But once the novelty of controlling a Pikachu wears off after 10 seconds you question what the point of it is. You can't do anything when controlling a Pokémon, except run around, pick up items and 'auto battle' wild Pokémon (the same as you'd do in "Let's Go" mode). So it doesn't really add anything to the experience beyond the gimmick itself existing. You can't even fly with flying Pokémon, or hell, jump with anything. It'd be cool if you had to control a water Pokémon to get something across a large lake, or control a tiny Pokémon to get into a tight hole, or control a steel or poison type to go through poisonous nettles or something. How about Pokémon races? The possibilities are endless. Of course having your swiss army Pokémon that is Koraidon/Miraidon makes most of the possibilities pointless. It can climb, swim, glide, move faster than anything else. While it has been great for post-game traversal, it made exploring the DLC areas lack a bit of the "exploring" part as you can basically get anywhere you want out the gate and moving from one place to another is as simple as gliding there from a high spot.

At least once you complete the DLC you get the ability to use free flight with your ride-mon, which is really the perfect gift for when there's no more exploring to do.

I guess the last thing that was a bigger let down than it seemed is the quest system. Having a bunch of extra tasks to do to earn this academy's currency sounds great! Until you realise this is not a set list of challenges, but rather an infinitely repeating list of like...10 things. "Take a photo of an electric Pokémon", "Collect 10 items from the ground", "Catch a Pokémon", "Travel 500 feet". You'll go through these "challenges" over and over and over, because the amount of points you need to get everything is a lot more than the amount they give.

In fact some of the rewards are adding starters to the biomes in the game, which... is fine. I don't know why Gamefreak think people jizz their pants so much for starters to the point they think a 10 hour grind to unlock the ability to catch them is so good. The grind CAN be heavily reduced by playing in a union room where all challenges of the players are mixed together and everyone gets points for every challenge any player completes. But as you can't even do random union rooms and of course this is locked behind paid online for Switch, I think the idea of making solo grinding vs group grinding be such a massive difference just comes off as scummy if anything, rather than the nice bonus it should be.

Another thing you unlock via the missions, albeit just by completing a certain amount rather than paying the BP, is Gamefreak's other thing to spam in every end-game part of a generation: Legendaries!

I really just don't know who this is for. Don't most players have multiple duplicates of most legendaries by now just sitting in Home? And let's be inclusive and count even players who are playing this as their very first Pokémon game - what are they going to DO with ~30 legendaries? I know I can't get in to the mindset of a current day kid, but I can't imagine it'd bring that same satisfaction as when we played as kids and got like ~5 legendary Pokémon to catch and overpower the game with. There's almost nothing left to even use them on by this point in the game anyway. I might not be so bothered by this but they went back to the really horrible style of legendary catching. Know how most legendary Pokémon now (including Ogerpon and Terapargos from this very DLC) are more "tough fight, guaranteed catch"? It was relatively fun and allowed you to catch the legendary in any ball you want. Well for all the many, many, returning legendary Pokémon this is done away with to be the bullshit RNG simulator of "get it to 1hp and throw a million Pokéballs at it cos fuck you". Who enjoys this!? Even the Sword and Shield DLC knew not to pull that shit and used raid dens instead.

By the way you can only get half the legendaries via solo missions, so if you don't have Switch online or anyone to play with, have fun not getting them

OK with my rants out of the way, the DLC itself is fine. The game still runs like doodoo, but ultimately this is just more of what you've had before, but now focused almost entirely on battles and using double battles instead of single battles. The areas are no more or less exciting than anything in Paldea, not even using any new kind of environments. But there's some fun in catching the 'new'/returning Pokémon and this ironically does a "school for Pokémon trainers" better than the main game did. The league club room is where a bunch of features that used to be base game stuff was finally added, like gym leader rematches and Pokémon throwing styles. It also finally gives a purpose for excess Pokémon material that you don't need to make any TMs, by having a machine that you throw a bunch in to and get randomly generated items, which can include tera shards (this DLC makes collecting them in general way easier), apricot Pokéballs and a looooot of junk to sell for money. It's basically just saying "you've beaten the game now, so there's no need to make you work for this stuff. Instead just RNG your way into it".