I thought I was done with this series after how much of an embarrassment swish was, but I ran into a leaked copy of legends by total accident and gave it a try, mostly just to rage at it for an hour or two, but somehow it's won me over. I've already put 11 hours into it and a good deal of that's just been running around catching pokemon and generally playing the game the way I want to, instead of being railroaded into boring dialogue after boring setpiece after boring dialogue. It's still there, this is pokemon after all, but the amount of restraint it's shown considering the past decade or so has been shocking. It's also on the easier side, as the newer games usually are, but whatever. I've played those rom hacks that want you to puzzle out exactly what team composition, movepools, and EV spreads you need to grind up to progress through one boss fight and they're fucking miserable. I'll take slightly-too-easy every time if it means I can just use mostly whatever pokemon I want to. Maybe I'll sour on it when there's no great challenging postgame content or the new way damage seems to calculate ends up being badly balanced, but really, gamefreak experimenting at all with the formula and not totally shitting the bed is worth celebrating in and of itself, and the changes here are very much worthwhile. It even runs better than swish did, so far.