I had fun, but not as much fun as I could have had.
Gen 8's beginning seems extremely rocky, it's second to Gen 5 for ambition but it takes the cake AND the steak when it comes to things feeling half baked.
Dynamaxing is probably cooler than Mega Evolution and Z-Moves, being able to do something once per fight really took out the specialness and made things just into an animation that would get grating. This was a bit of a breath of fresh air to only have available for certain battles, and still pretty optional on if you really wanted to or not.
The Gigantimax forms are cool but I only found like one and not till the end of the game, there really needed to be a way to acquire the form (when that pokemon has one) with those Dynamax candies instead of needing to catch one that can in a raid battle, though since Gigantimax was mostly cosmetic it was kind of not important outside of looking cool, which is very important. Also a bit sad with the recent pushes to the game for maxing IVs or now even altering natures for competitiveness sake, that Gigantimax flag being on a pokemon is still determined at capture, meaning you'd have to just trash the pokemon you traveled with through most of the game to replace it with a newer, fancier looking one, but only SOMETIMES fancy looking.
The raid battles are coolish? But they're also stupid, and frustrating, cause the rng partners can be really stupid and unworkable combinations, but the rewards for them in relatively high level (at the time, with some of the scaling) Pokemon and Technical Records, along with the exp candy, it sometimes was fun to burn an hour here or there just dicking around in the Wild Area.
Wild Area itself was a little neat, definitely nice to have control over the camera (which was easy to feel like it was missing when going back to standard routes), and sometimes visually it looked... pretty okay, aesthetics wise, as long as you didn't look at anything closely. Lot of the game looks low quality but sometimes the overuse of the shaders would lead to... something at least with tasty looking colors all over.
Multiplayer in the Wild Area is strange, I suppose there's the codes for raid battles, trades, cards, etc but there's nothing for just getting a specific player in the same instance as you besides brute force waiting and hoping a connection happens. Even then with it sometimes only being one way, it's hard to really feel like the worlds can connect, but when you are able to coordinate to hang out with someone it's pretty novel, and makes me curious about what can be done to expand upon this in the future, but knowing Gamefreak this is their only attempt at that and will be gone.
I never got to see Gen 5's world visiting thing in action due to it being local, but it seems like this still is mostly catered toward local because of all the multiplayer systems just being so confusing, the 4 digit codes can wind up partnering you up with someone completely different when trying to do a private trade/fight/card exchange, and that there isn't an easy way to just use friends list functions for this seems bananas.

Story wise... what the heck was that? Some of it almost feels like spite on the part of Gamefreak "Hey you said you didn't want a story and just wanted a Pokemon adventure? Well here you go!" Except then it's all pretty backloaded and tries to tell a story for about 5 minutes and then just... stops again.
Chasing the ever-perfect Charizard champion all over the place wasn't making for interesting dialog for most of the game, and it really barely felt like a narrative of you, the player, getting to go on an adventure, and are instead just babysitting Hop the whole time.
The slightly less central story elements, Sonia and Magnolia, anything with Rose, etc, "hey there's a huge explosion, something is happening, all felt like times when the player should have followed along instead of just being shooed away to get back to THEIR* (*Hop's) gym challenges. The "let the adults take care of this" mood wasn't the best feeling, and when you'd next encounter the people involved, you wouldn't really get an update on what happened either, so the story that barely existed felt like it existed even less, or like it was totally absent to be replaced with something with less substance.
There were better things though, like Bede and Marnie and their storylines, and the Gym Leaders, etc, the dialog wasn't worthless, and there was potential for interesting things, but the game chose to not pursue any of them, for just the kind of super bare bones... whatever that was.

Route 1 sure had some amazing pokemon this time around, bird and turtle carried me for large portions of the game, I do like a lot of the new pokemon designs, whether Galarian forms (Cursola) or originals, there's not much I feel like complaining about there, the distribution of them was pretty good, their movesets were maybe really trashy though, and with most of the valuable TMs being tucked away (thanks TRs though, I liked their limited use but unlimited acquisition), it sometimes felt tough for me to identify a pokemon that was going to have a diverse enough moveset to not be pretty helplessly throwing not-very-effective attacks at some types.
The "balance" for just playing along felt maybe the best that it had been in the series so far, at least up till around the 7th gym where then the player pokemon levels get kind of crazy due to all the exp coming in from high stage evolutions being fought. This was a big surprise, and it was nice to actually occasionally lose multiple pokemon to the gym leader, which hasn't felt like a thing since Elesa's Emolga back in Gen 5.
Sometimes it has felt like since Gen 5 there's been an overabundance of mid-route healers, but it didn't seem so bad here. There were a few trips back to town to heal, or taking out the tent and making curry to do the same. Though it was pretty awful for the League healing between fights and all the tension of "Am I going to have enough PP for this?" being completely removed.
The removal of some conventions was sometimes alarming, Magnolia/Sonia not rating your Dex when talking to them directly, Mom not healing you when you visit home, the Hall of Fame entries seemingly being completely absent from the game, Route 10 and where it was but what it wasn't, no department store, or the format for the League's tournament. Changing things up to make them a bit fresher can be neat, but while a format change can be kind of cool, some missing things just seemed like complete oversights on what has been series staples that people are expecting to see but have nothing in their place.
While the only fight I lost was at a cafe where the tender had 10+ levels on me, a lot of the fights still felt pretty threatening and made me use items (generally post battle, but occasionally in battle while stalling out a Curse from Cursola) a lot more frequently than I have in previous generations.  It really felt like there was a healthy threat for most of the game, and then things like the Wild Area having even tougher challenges to optionally take on in the mean time was fun too.
The catch restriction on Wild Area pokemon was totally uncalled for, if you're able to beat up the Pokemon then you should be allowed to have the pokemon, it was really lame to find cool pokemon (that cute ghost dragon) that were just 1 or 2 levels too high for the badge you had and just have to ignore having seen it till you get more badges (where then it's no longer there cause weather changed.)
Also a lot of the returning pokemon are exceptionally boring, and while it's maybe cool to highlight the lesser known ones sometimes, fucking Charizard is there and they really want you to know it.
Charizard, Gamefreak's Lucario, present absolutely everywhere, including on the previously fun spin animation which now has to be used ironically because even it is themed with Charizard, and even really seriously even the max curry cooking level medal has a Charizard on it? What the heck man, that's nuts. The Champion and his brother won't ever shut up about him, why Charizard specifically and so many other things dropped for an otherwise pretty boring return selection of available pokemon.

I don't know how much I mind the Dexit thing, maybe I mind it a lot, but I also feel like with all the things people have shown about all the models and animations actually being really workable with third party tools and hacking them in, it obviously means they're just doing a slow roll out through the wild area, right? Right?? Though it seems naive to think that Gamefreak will support this game post-release, they've never done it before so why would they suddenly start now? Surely they think it's time for Gen 8.5 to be worked on in whole instead.
Maybe that's not right, a lot of their verbage about the whole situation sounds like they're really -proud- to finally be taking the stance that sometimes you won't be able to see every pokemon in every game, and maybe that could be a fine thing if not for all the previous legacy they've tried to build up over the years.
The commercials about trying to salvage a parent's Blaziken from the Gen 3 games to bring them up to Sun/Moon, that was a neat little story they were telling about what is unique to this franchise, with an exceptional history of bringing things forward, for years and years and years, and now they're talking about, and actively trying to take that away.
For any dozens of reasons people have enjoyed the legacy part of the game, be it a favorite from an old game, or collection ribbons from each game, a pokemon family growing with each stop on their island hopping journey, it's personally disappointing and also saddening to read what "the community" is having stomped out for them, in a game series that has no similar peer in regard to personal progression projects being something that can be kept over the years.
If it's done for balance reasons, or the slow roll out, then that's all fine I suppose, it's not like that's new with them wanting to restrict the tournament things to "for the first year, you can only use pokemon that were obtained in this new game, no previous imports allowed" but the concept of "Pokemon Home being the place where you can have your pokemon when they can't come to the newest games, think of it like them taking a break!" is completely insane, from the perspective of hundreds of my pokemon and what was hundreds of hours being deleted from Pokemon Bank because of a subscription lapse, there's no way to trust that they're going to keep the data when they're so eager to shut down systems like Gen 5's Dream World once the current generation ends and there has to be yet another NEW transfer method (granted needing new methods made sense up to 5 since no way to patch things into the game itself, so 6 and 7 sharing Pokebank was good, sans the ridiculous concept of a yearly subscription fee.) If they really are wanting to cut things down, then they should have the balls to say that they're doing the same thing Gen 3 did to Gen 1 and 2, and disallow importing from old games ENTIRELY. Then it's at least consistent instead of "maybe your pokemon was good enough to be a Charizard, Pikachu, or Lucario, but maybe you're shit out of luck." But oh wait, with the rerelease of Gen 1 and 2 digitally and their interactions with Pokemon Bank, while you can't directly use your original cartridge pokemon, they've still been trying to spread this idea of a legacy series where what you did in the past is something you can bring to the future.

I dunno, overall I still really liked the time I spent with it, which was a moderate amount time more than necessary to clock in at an early 30s hour range, but goofing around in Wild Area and filling Pokedex on a per route basis (till that stopped cause it got stale and the checklist system wasn't as fleshed out for the interface it was in other generations) was a fair bit of enjoyment and refreshing feeling for a while.
But it all really makes me want to go back to the old games for things that felt closer to feature complete instead of the really kind of questioning if things had to be rushed for the holiday season feeling that missing things aren't truly deliberately missing "for balance" or "because it needs a lot of work" things that have been expressed.
I am going to feel like an idiot when I buy Gen 8.5 from Gamefreak's b-team in order to get a Pokemon game that feels like it's actually done, but that's probably what will inevitably happen. I expect no long term support for the "base" Sword/Shield, but I really do think that it's time for them to support games in post like everyone else does, and not have things be simple patches to fix crashing. Oh yeah and it crashed once, I lost some progress, it wasn't a big deal since it was just Wild Area stuff, but it happened.


Post writing afterthoughts. The fashion was as strong as XY, though it hardly felt like I had an outfit progression. Most of the good stuff was at the beginning and while really cool clothes existed over time it could feel hard to assemble an outfit that compliments or properly contrasts the colors you may already have. XY still felt like it did a better job of that.
The mid-battle dialog and animations was another thing that felt neat that there were more conditions than there have been, though their usage was pretty weird. Yes Hop, I'm using supereffective attacks. Yes Hop's brother, I'm using supereffective attacks. You don't need to mention it every single fight, but I guess it was mostly restricted to those siblings. Still kinda fun when others would reach their last pokemon and announce their (futile) final attacks as if they were a bit more potent, which granted sometimes would catch me off guard.
The cards system was really cute, it was fun to design poses and use backgrounds and stuff. It's understandable that it didn't have a screenshot function for taking custom shots wherever, but it would have been neat to have a photomode of sorts like some games have, that you could attach to the cards.
While I wouldn't want to see a game made entirely out of the Wild Area, I did kind of want to play a meta game of sorts with it, where you'd progress solely through Wild Area starting from the low levels and working your way up to tougher raids and more distant from beginning encounters, but with scaling seeming to be badge/champion based and now everything being a minimum level of 60, that's definitely impossible without starting a new save, which means badge restrictions on capture, which means still definitely impossible.


Individual pokemon reviews:
Monkey starter. Mostly useless, was very likely going to be kicked out of team after evolution, but always made the cut just because of being able to Screech at enemies.
Bird. Strong bird, first early route bird I've used since Gen 1. Carried the hell out of me though most of the final quarter of the game.
Hair gremlin. Raised it because found in a raid and thought it was gonna have a special form because the pillar of light war purple. He wasn't a special one, but while crazy ugly, wound up being invaluable for some encounters.
Cursola. Fun playstyle I've never used before of Curse and Rest/Snore. I always had trouble with steel enemies and other physically resistant ones, so draining their health this way was really humorous and more fun than buffing and slapping with ineffective wings. Also wanted to have a traded-in pokemon, so this fit the bill since not being available in Sword.
Squartle. One of the ugliest Phase 1 evolutions that isn't a retconned baby. Was retired from team pretty early after evolving but came back since the champion choreographed that he was going to use Charizard, so I wanted to humiliate it with the ultimate insult, Stealth Rock.
The fossil with the bottom half ice and the top half electric. It's hideous, I hate it, and I also love it, but I mostly hate it. Tried to kick it out of team for not being of use to me, but it was in the team so long that some kind of sentimental feelings formed and it BELONGED in the team.

Electric Corgi. It evolved and I got rid of it. Maybe ugliest pokemon in the generation. It wasn't very good before it evolved but at least it was mostly cute.
Galarian Farfetch'd. Was going to be my only Gen 8 origin pokemon, but it died so frequently that it would spend entire routes dead and really lack the exp gains. The "history of this pokemon" guy said that he was feeling sorry for being disappointing, and while I gave him plenty of chances, unfortunately he just truly was disappointing and needed to be cut from the team. I feel for you, Redux, We both tried, but it didn't work.