The latest Pokémon games use the same assets for all two of their dungeons. Galar Coal Mine and Galar Coal Mine 2. At the point in the story where it's time to go face the bad guy (for reasons unknown to even the writers) you walk up to this huge building and think, "oh, this must be a decently sized dungeon like Silph Co. or something." then you just. ride an ELEVATOR for a bit. And that's it.

I think it's approach to dungeons that I just described should give you a feel for how Gamefreak has handled literally every other aspect of the game. That is to say, poorly, or not at all.

I hope you don't like exploring! There's fucking none of that here. I can count the number of areas that actually require or even have OPTIONAL exploration in them on one hand. Optional content, for that matter, seems to be a thing of the forgotten past. You'll see everything there is to see in this tiny region by the time you beat the last gym in your 15-20 hour playthrough. Once you beat the game you can go catch the legendary - yeah, remember when that was just a part of the game on top of a lot of post game content in generations past? - and there you have it! I hope you like hatching eggs and doing the worst iteration of the battle facility of all time. Because there is NOTHING ELSE.

So like I said Galar is pretty small. The region is a straight line from your home to a train, where the train delivers you to the rest of the region, two loops connected by the wild area. Each town is tiny outside of two or three, and there's a single interior home that is literally copied and pasted for each and every home in the region, just with different NPCs inside. Infamously there is the town that is just a literal alleyway and a Pokémon center.

Side note: That town houses the gym leader that does lip flaps into a microphone with nothing coming out. I don't care that there is no voice acting but why on earth would you call attention to it with such an awkward cutscene?

Each town houses a gym - there are no more towns that are just there to build the world or house optional content, of course. Some gyms are fine. Some gyms just have you literally fight a few trainers in a row (not even giving you a physical space to explore or solve puzzles) then give you the gym leader. These gym leaders are braindead easy.

Braindead easy is the name of the game here, really. That's one thing that can't be attributed to the impossible Pokémon release cycle imposed by The Pokémon Company. That is instead all on Junichi Masuda's incredibly misguided ideas on game design. (He believes that since everyone has a phone he must make his games short and easy so that people will play them. I'm not going to even bother criticizing that because it is so obviously stupid to everyone in the entire world.)

The story is bad too, if you can imagine that. It stops you all the time to shove the NONEXISTENT story down your throat. Hop stops you constantly to say stupid annoying garbage. It is a huge detriment to the game that you can not do anything for long without being stopped by someone to get a bunch of terrible dialogue. It's not even like Sun and Moon that actually had a good story so that it was somewhat excusable. Hop is... annoying. Leon is annoying. Sonia is fine? Marnie is fine? The villains and their motivations are completely incomprehensible though. I literally just didn't know what was happening at one point, when you have to go talk to random people to find the bad people that had replaced the good people or something by one of the villains. Then later that villain isn't actually bad? Or something? I don't really know. It is amazingly incomprehensible and unfinished. The story is about climate change I guess? But the message is so muddy that you can probably read whatever you want into it.

So like, basically everything about this game is bad. What purpose does this serve? Who is this game for? Are there people who liked this? I think this must be what a film critic feels like when audiences fawn over a terrible popcorn movie. I guess this game might be cool if you've never played a video game before. Or if you were born in the Stone Age I bet it's really cool. I kid. But only a little bit.

I guess most of the people who loved this game are casual gamers. That's fine. But if you're at all invested in video games as a medium I don't think there is anything of value here.

No more Pokémon. Society has progressed past the need for Pokémon.

Honestly one of the best 2D platformers ever. It's dampened slightly by a terrible bit of late-game levels (my playthroughs tend to end after Oil Ocean), but not enough to dispel my overall enthusiasm for this game. I don't even mind the special stages, because at this point they're practically permanently etched into my brain.

When I was younger, I thought Sonic just wasn't for me. I'd tried and failed many times to get through the first game, but always stopped at Marble Zone. I might have even said once or twice that Sonic was never good.

Sonic wasn't good. At first. Until this game.

This game owns.

I want to like this game! I really do!

But it just feels so bad to play! Even Sonic, the most fun gameplay style here, isn't all that great. Not to mention the other characters, all uniformly worse and annoying.

It has a charming jankiness and it's incomprehensible storytelling is fun. But the core game is just bad.

This game (along with Sacred Stones) got me through a very tough time in my life. I've played this game more than any other 3DS game. I'm so conflicted, honestly. The map design is generally awful, but the draw here is the character building. The game gives you a wide-open sandbox to craft your army however you like and make a completely broken team, and that is undeniably satisfying and fun. But in exchange the game isn't very difficult and the simple maps don't give you the satisfaction inherent to taking down a tough chapter in other series entries. The story is a messy concoction of every possible fantasy trope rolled into one, but it still has an extremely lovable cast and emotional beats that work. I'm just so mixed here. I really do love it though.

Side note: this game started the extremely unfortunate trend of Fire Emblem games not having an iconic amazing recruitment theme