Look, I've already gushed about this game at length before, but now it's on NSO so it's time for it to become my single personality trait again for the next few weeks. I'll try to cover some of the things I didn't manage to mention the first time around.

The NSO version has ONLINE FUNCTIONALITY!!! You can finally play the TCG on a GOOD official simulator!! Like this game is a fun enough RPG-ish sort of thing but it felt like it's absolutely screaming to be played against others with your shitty cobbled-together decks once you're done and now you CAN!! Anyone wanna throw down hmu, I will give you the business with whatever terrible deck I end up scraping together (if you meta deck vs me I will not associate with you)

The gameplay loop is just brilliant if you're into this sort of thing. Beat people, get cards, slowly build up a collection to put together a deck the way you want it. It's progression in the typical RPG sense (yeah your deck with four Bills and Oaks is pretty objectively better than your starting deck with none), but also progression that gives you more options and lets you explore funny different things. At the same time, the fact that you don't have all the options at the start forces you to toy around with weirder stuff instead of looking up "ptcg base set meta" and building Haymaker. Though some of these cards are seriously bad, so whether or not that's a good thing will probably depend on what you're stuck with. This time I managed to pull five Hitmonchans in the first hour so I'm living good (I am NOT building haymaker I PROMISE)

I've talked a lot now about how bad base set meta is, but part of that is what makes it so fun! Yeah, there's a lot of really bad cards, and there's a pretty clear gap between The Good Ones and most everything else. But! The meta trainer cards are so hilariously overpowered - to the point that later TCG would change most of them to Supporters just to have a hope in hell of balancing them! - that they single-handedly make the game incredibly fun to play. You have a really good set-up card in front of me? Okay buddy I have four Gust of Wind and I can just snipe your entire bench. Can't find the card I need? Cool I just pulled three Bills in a row and then pulled Professor Oak and it pulled another Bill and I just went though 80% of my deck in one turn and now all my guys are set up. They make the game extremely fast-paced and volatile and using them against the AI to get a full setup going in like 1 or 2 turns is an unbelievable power trip

Thematically the game is so funny. Like, the culture of this entire world is built entirely around Pokemon cards. Nobody talks about literally anything else. The only building on the island that isn't there to facilitate the TCG is some guy's house and- oh that's for the TCG as well. They have legendary cards that are protected by magic and shit?? Yeah there's magic in this world?? And it has the standard Pokemon message of treating your companions with love and care and focusing on the fun of the adventure rather than getting fixated on winning, except these guys are talking about trading cards instead of real creatures! No Ronald I will not love and cherish each of my pokemon trading cards shut the fuck up