part of me acknowledges that this got better retroactively because of the stagnation of the pokemon series, but it's also genuinely a really neat concept. you steal pokemon. you catch pokemon that you can't normally catch (starters, metagross, etc.). you play as someone who's given an explicit backstory and is implied to be morally ambiguous. most important, you have an extremely limited pool of pokemon to pick from. it's a similar idea as "art through adversity". you will look at pokemon like slugma and stantler differently than you would in any other game because they'll actually look usable. again, none of this is perfect by any means, but it was a really creative take on the pokemon formula that wasn't just trying to subvert tradition for the sake of advertising (i.e. "no gyms!!!!!" in pokemon sm). there was an original idea here, and regardless of how you think it's executed, you really can't deny that it's unlike any other pokemon game, for the better, i'd argue.