Pokemon Sword and Shield Babyyyyy

The good:
-The music is very good for the most part and is probably one of the best in the series. Very rarely it might not be the most fitting and that can stand out but it's not that big of a deal.

-They really fixed the problem with SM and USUM where the game could feel like a slog with all the cutscenes. Some people may still not like how it is now, but it's def a lot better than Gen 7 in that regard.

-The UI is really well designed. They went with something more simplistic this time and it's pretty neat which was probably a necessity when moving to a system with one screen.

-The battle animations are really not as much of an issue as people make them out to be. The old ones are fine, and the new ones are very good. When they are bad though(which can be seen from time to time on some old moves), they are really noticeably bad.

-Some of the characters like Hop, Sonia, Bede, are honestly pretty decent for pokemon standards.

-Getting into competitive is a lot easier now. Mints allows nature to be changed(though getting mints is a bit time-consuming), pokejobs easily allow you to train up multiple pokemon's EVs pretty fast, and raid pokemon can have guaranteed perfect IVs based on how many stars they have. The last one matters the least here, however, as the only reliable way to get a pokemon you want from raids is by using a glitch.

The bad:

-The game is stupid easy. I was not overleveled at all and still steamrolled through the game. For reference, I died twice in my entire run. One to the fourth gym's ace who swept me team and secondly to the last gym's ace(and in my defense there, I forgot to heal up before fighting him). Raid battles are the exception. They start on easy, but if you're trying to do high level ones the partner AI will eventually get so bad it'll be entire luck based. If you play with actual people they become a joke, so people who pay for Nintendo Online get an advantage. There's still no strategy, though, it's just hammer away. To add to this even more, you can beat a few raid battles and get a shitton of XP candies. When I died once to the fourth gym's ace, I literally beat two raids and the candies were enough to level up a pokemon like 6+ times and sweep the gym. Also, I played the whole game on set.

-Dexit. All monster catching games have to cut monsters at some point, it's inevitable. It's going to happen eventually, but not with this game. Almost nothing warrants it. No big aspect of the series is really redone. This game has LESS content than the majority of mainline games. An interview with a GF employee confirmed that these are the old models too, just "refined". Not remade.

-To go more on the game's balancing, there's an exploit which lets you get an Arcanine/Ludicolo/Ninetales an hour in with an endgame moveset. This is because the move relearner has no cost unlike previous games, which wouldn't be an issue if he was near the end or something. He's not, though and is in every pokecenter meaning not only does this balancing issue exist, but it's very easy to just stumble upon and can probably be used on other pokes too.

-The wild area is such a cool concept, but it's executed really poorly. It's boring and there's very few things to do. Those being finding and battling/catching pokemon(which is already a thing with the maingame, the only difference here is that apparently around 60% of the game's mons can be found here), and raid battles which can only carry this place so far. There's practically no cool secrets, and stuff that could be a secret is ruined. For example, there's an island in the middle of the first half of the wild area you can surf to which has some high level pokemon(though by the time you're able to access it you can already find pokemon this strong in the wild area anyway, the only difference is what's available), and there is a Haxorus in the middle guarding some super rare item(or so I've been told, he never shows up for me). What's the issue here? Not only is the island so easily visible, it also takes a decent amount of space on the map and is straight up marked on it with its name(Axew's Eye). This happens with another potentially cool part of the wild area which also has high level mons.

-The game has a very bad problem with models not showing unless you're close. Many times models will pop or fade out if you're a certain distance away, which is a pretty bizarre problem especially considering that SM and USUM didn't have this issue. To make things worse, in the wild area you can't see any pokemon at all unless you're within what's basically 5 feet of them, which makes it look very empty. I don't know how the switch can't handle showing a decent amount of pokemon in a radius larger than a meter or two so I'm going to put this blame on the devs for shitty/inconsistent coding, ESPECIALLY since outside of the wild area on routes the game can show a decent amount of pokemon from farther distances so ???

-The actual textures/models of people and pokemon look fine, but for some reason in a lot of battles they look... reflective(if that's the right word). Here's a picture https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/220201930826317825/648209791558221825/unknown.png

-Leon is a fucking awful champion and character. His personality doesn't stretch beyond "I'm Leon the undefeated champion, Charizard is my undefeatable fuckbuddy, and the only thing defeatable about me is my sense of direction." He's a bit of an egoistic prick which makes you wonder why anyone in the damn game likes him for any reason other than being good at battling. (STORY SPOILERS AHEAD) Even after you save his life and the region, he talks about how he's gonna make you just another name on his winning streak.

-The Kanto pandering in this game is awful. In your own room there's a poster which says "Popular galar pokemon!" with 3 Kanto mons. Charizard and Gengar get gigantimaxes despite already having megas. The champion's ace is charizard. The majority of non-galar Gigantimaxes are Kanto. Charizard is the ONLY starter from any previous game to not get fucked by dexit.

-Many moves were removed from the game. A number of these were Z-moves or signature moves of pokes which don't actually appear in the game which is fine, but some of these are signature moves of pokemon that do, or just moves that pokemon in the game use anyway. This apparently hurts the competitive viability of a bunch of pokes which relied on those moves to have a niche in the scene. UPDATE: To put this into perspective for some pokemon, the timburr line, a monotype fighting line, does not learn any good STAB fighting moves by leveling except for Hammer Arm which is in the mid 40s. This is because wake-up slap was removed. Every other fighting type move it learns by leveling has some detrimental side-factor(super low accuracy, own stats decreasing, etc.) Several notable moves like return, hidden power, pursuit, etc. were removed.

-Gigantimax is a terrible system because of how you're supposed to actually use it. You have to catch gigantimax pokemon in raids. What does this mean? It means that pokemon you've been training the entire game and has a cool gigantimax form you've seen can't actually activate it, and there's no way to give it the ability to. You have to catch one in a raid, and even then actually getting the right raids is very much RNG based and be time consuming, to the point where a glitch is the most consistent way to get it. What happened to forming bonds with your pokes?

-To add on to the above statement, even after you beat the raid you aren't guaranteed to successfully catch the gigantimax. You also only get one go at it.

-You can't connect directly to your friends if you want to trade or battle. Instead, if you want to connect to someone, you both have to enter a 4 digit code. On top of all this, you are not actually guaranteed to connect for some reason, and if someone else happens to use the same code even if you do end up connecting to someone it may not be your friend! To make things worse, when you're trying to trade the game may just say "your trading partner has quit the menu" or something and boot you out. I am saying all of these things from multiple personal experiences, and my internet connection is very good so it has nothing to do with that.
Remember, you have to pay for this online service.

-No GTS. Why? This generation still has the same shitty "sell the same game twice with minor content locked into each version" trend the series has had since day one. It still has the same shitty low encounter rates for some pokemon the series has had since day one(fucking 1% duraludon appearance chance). It'd be more justified if they got rid of the NEED for the GTS, but they didn't.

-No touchscreen controls in battle. There isn't much more to say on this.

-A lot of times when you attack in battle the enemy trainer model will straight up pop out and pop back in. It looks like shit. I don't know if there's a consistency to it or the moves which do it are random, but if I had to take a guess I'd say special-type moves do it.

-I don't know what the correct term is but the aliasing/textures/whatever of the character models in the overworld looks like shit. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/220201930826317825/648219250372378644/20191124_125142.jpg See for yourself. I know this isn't the best way to show it because it's a photo, but you can probably notice all the weird/pointy pixels in the photo. That's very noticeable, and this is docked mode. I can't play in handheld mode due to problems with my switch so I can't comment how it looks there, but as it is now it looks pretty ugly. This is made even worse by the fact that those masses of pointy pixels are sliding up and down over and over because of idle animations.(I was playing on a monitor so my face was decently close to the screen but I haven't noticed this in any other game)

-No legends/mythicals/whatever aside from the 3 story ones.

-The world freezes on ladders. Many people claim this is not true, and that only goes for a few select areas. Try it out on route 6 if you don't believe me. It won't work on the very first visble ladder when you fly to it, but if you go down that one and go down to the two ladders on either side of the double trainers, you will notice it very easily. It only happens to trainer and pokemon models, though. As an added bonus, you can notice how much the shadows in the area stutter when you go up and down those ladders if you want to see more graphic errors.

-There is absolutely fuck all to do in the towns. They have very cool layouts, but at most there tends to be some items. The bare minimum is a pokecenter and a stadium. The map says the list of buildings when you hover over towns, but more often than not usually if something unique is there it's likely just used for a cutscene or two. Later on, they'll put a singular NPC who hangs out in a court and teaches you a singular move as "Move Tutor" next to building names of a town on a map, in what I can only guess is an attempt to make it look more full than it really is because it's hyped up a bit and looks very busy.

-The scale of pokemon is pretty bad. On the overworld I find it alright, but in battle it's dumb. Especially so when LGPE had proper scaling. In battle in this game, a 4'11 pokemon and a 6'11 pokemon can both be the player's height. The game can certainly handle big pokemon given that dynamaxing exists. This image puts the problem into perspective https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/511014956255281152/643577829342314496/Screenshot_20191111_114331.jpg

-Despite being the most expensive mainline game, it is probably the shortest or one of the shortest. The game took me 23 hours but a good 2-3+ of those were AFK and I absolutely did NOT rush through it and explored most of the mechanics and side stuff the game had to offer like wild area, raids, character customization, trainer cards, etc. If you look on howlongtobeat, you will see most people beat the main story in less time for SWSH than the other games.

-The postgame is pretty lackluster having nothing except for a short afterstory and a battle tower with less stuff to do than other games' postgame battle facilities.

-Some items, like certain TRs can only be gotten from certain raids so getting those is entirely luck-based.

-There are no caves or dungeons. The most complex things like that in the game are two mines which are less complex than Viridian Forest in FRLG. There is no victory road. The aforementioned mines are so simple the only thing that sets them apart from the regular routes are the fact that you can't fly in them, but you can use the escape rope(the one, because it is infinite). A lot of regular routes are also short as hell, including the last one.

-Story, so watch out in case you care about spoilers. Firstly, I would like to preface that I do not thing pokemon needs to be a story-heavy game to be good. However, a shit story drags down a game's quality more than no story and a shit story is exactly what this game has. Now on to the actual story, absolutely NOTHING happens for the most part. Whenever something comes up and you rush to stop it, Sonia and Leon say "nah dw let the adults handle it" and you go on with your journey. This is more realistic and makes sense, but does not really work for a game. Once the story actually gets going, the writing quality is baaad. After you beat the semifinals of the champion cup, Leon invites you out to dinner. He doesn't show up for some reason though, and turns out something came up and he had to go for a meeting with Rose. Instead of waiting, you and your friends decide to raid the building where he's having the meeting because ??? You're stopped along the way by people who basically just say "can you please fuck off we are literally just trying to do our job". At the top, you find out what the meeting is about. Galar is going to have an energy crisis... in one thousand years(which doesn't even make sense in a world where you have millions of creatures who can infinitely shit out resources and energy). Rose is trying to force it on Leon to help him with it, and Leon eventually gives in and says he'll help out but a day after his championship match with you. Rose then goes and does it the day of your match anyway because he could literally not wait for a problem that would happen one thousand years into the future. Before you fight Leon, Rose sets his plan into motion which is to awaken an alien called Eternatus which is a huge source of energy so Leon can catch it(As far as I can tell Eternatus existing has basically no foreshadowing and he just kinda feels shoved in). You and Hop go to the slumbering weald where Zacian and Zamazenta supposedly reside(which is literally your backyard, by the way) and find a shrine with a rusted sword and shield. You then go to where Eternatus awakened(side note: Raihan is there and says he and the gym leaders worked to evacuate everyone despite everyone still being in the town and not commenting on the fact that the world is ending). You beat Rose, then go to the top of the tower where Leon gets beaten by Eternatus. You then fight him in a 1v1 which is extremely easy(he's level 60 and is one pokemon, the champion who you fight shortly after also has a team of 60+s so ???) and then he transforms. First, you and Hop fight him together in a "battle" where nothing happens for 3 turns then Zacian and Zamazenta show up. You then do a raid battle where you and Hop do fuck all while the two legends handle Eternatus on their own, they fuck off, then the day is saved. You then fight Leon the next day and that's it.



Overall I would say it's probably one of, if not the worst mainline pokemon if you compare it to the other ones and the standards they set. The story is bad, the difficulty is non-existent, there are no caves/dungeons. There is less content despite a higher price tag. The game seems to be full of errors and problems generated by it being both rushed/lazy and genuine incompetence. I bought the game used and I would recommend everyone who wants to try it out to do the same, because if you like pokemon you will probably like this game, but it's still not good.

BTW WHO'S BUYING POKEMON ULTRA SWORD AND ULTRA SHIELD COMING NOVEMBER 2020 BABYYY