if they didnt hellaciously fumble the bag by hardly improving RSE's STANK regional dex, one of the few major things they couldve easily changed, this mightve been a 10. the delta episode, the updating of all the locations to super elaborate 3d landscapes, more megas that are seamlessly integrated, and the crown jewel of the updated wally fight wouldve made this god tier if you werent fighting the same pokemon every single trainer. like the first gym is 5 geodudes and a nosepass. like what the fuck. give em a lileep or something. an aron. fuckin anything like DUDE

suffered very very hard from basically just being a Backup Plan for if people didnt like Legends Arceus and/or if they wanted a more Direct Remake. and like even then if they were gonna make a beat-for-beat remake why not make a remake of platinum which is far and away the preferred improved definitive version like would it even be THAT much more work. like i love the visual style and the lil flourishes they gave to the trainers and the underground/not needing HMs are such massive improvements to sinnoh but the whole time youre playing you can just FEEL that something huge is missing yknow? its an unfortunate game to be sure, but on its own merits its still a fun and cute one and its nice to go through sinnoh with fairy types being an option, plus I love the pokeball sticker system. probably just play Renegade Platinum, though.

suffered ridiculously hard from being released one year before pokemon finally started the DLC model; if og sun/moon got a season pass with the Ultra Megalopolis Episode and the Rainbow Rocket Episode then they might be the best pokemon games ever but having a second game that's very very similar but swaps out the exceptional story climax of the lillie family with the (also extremely good) ultra megalopolis segment and the mina trial feels unfortunate. like there's no Best way to experience gen 7. either you miss the best character moment or you miss the best Region Lore moment and the best trial and the cool postgame and the better dex.

honestly on a replay (via blaze black 2 redux) the story was, for the most part, MUCH worse than in bw1 cause like why does your character care about any of this. hugh is the main character which sucks cause hes extremely simple and cant carry the entire game. it feels like youre just going through the motions against team plasma this time. like in bw1 you were also definitely not the main character but that was fine because N was and he's the best character ever plus all the other themes and shit were way more solidly portrayed. that being said this game DOES still show off prominently how the region and characters changed since the events of bw1 and the shit they're doing now is so cool and interesting that in my opinion it makes up for the main through-path story being mid. and once you establish that you get an exceptionally fuckin good pokemon game with a shockingly in depth regional dex and a crazy set of gyms and sense of scale. the village bridge is one of the best things in any video game ever

played it first on ps4 then switch, wish either of those ports coulda been more optimized but it was still a blast. honestly I wish the snatcher hard mode dlc was tuned better; imo this game starts to feel kinda finnicky when you have to hyper speedrun everything and it ended up feeling kinda frustrating unfortunately. coulda felt a lot more fun w/less daunting challenges or if you didn't need to do get all the stamps to get the true ending but hey the game still smacks hard as shit. i adopted hat kid and bow kid btw theyre making snow angels outside