Might as well give my thoughts too. For what its worth, I have previously played Yellow and Chrystal, as well as some of the N64 spin-offs, the TCG and watched the show back in the day. So I have been out of the loop for awhile...
The first thing I'll say is that I like how the game lets you build an actual team early on, as opposed to early series giving you shitmon until halfway through. Forget Dexit, going to the wild area for the first time, it was overwhelming how many of the little bastards were available to catch all at once. You could really start customizing your team, though you don't really stop swapping out members until after the fourth gym, at least in my case.
The Wild Area sort of breaks leveling though, because if you want to spend the time Catching 'Em All, and to an extent I did, then you will be overlevelled when going into the first few gyms. I blew through the first two with my team in their twenties, which is apparently a common experience. I also thought some of the towns were good, apparently things have changed a lot over the years because that Seaside town we got was bigger than anything bar Goldenrod in Chrystal. Others like the Fairy town were very small though. Shout out to no HMs, too. Apparently they took this out in Sun/Moon and I am happy for it. The core Pokemon formula is also, twenty years later, still quite strong. The gameplay is addictive but not unhealthy, some of the monsters are cute, cool, or nostalgic and its a decent return on your money, even if you are like me and have no real interest in online/competitive play.
Overtime, I became less overlevelled as I became less interested in wandering around in the tall grass for five minutes to catch a pokemon I didn't really care about, and finally found a real struggle with the Champ. I cheesed him with revives, first time I had to do that in a battle that I had gone into full strength. To be fair, the typing on his pokemon was in one or two cases not obvious or was well set up to beat my remaining team, so good on GF at least sticking in one worthy opponent.
Oh man, it sounds like I really liked the game? Well, onto the negatives. The Wild Area itself was empty and desolate, it could have done with a few Bellsprout Towers or other such challenges to keep you busy. This is not made up for in the traditional routes, too, which are small, some of them pathetically so. Other people have complained of the lack of mazes but the simple fact is that the poor field of vision and lack of camera control the game gave you made wide open routes of the old style impossible. Controlling a camera in 3D is something that other game companies figured out in the PS2 era, GF should have done a better job. Everyone else also figured out how to have enemies pop in more then twelve feet away from your character. Oh, and on those routes? Very few different character models. Given the game's simplistic graphics, its frustrating that they couldn't have given us more old and new trainer classes, as well as more battles with them. Some of this battling was cut to make up for shared XP (which I like) but it was also a means to its own end back in the day, without these where are you ever going to get to fight 3 or 4 Pokemon in a gym-type battle outside of another human. It all made the world feel small, you know, because it was. It was a small world, after all.
And the so-called story. Oh, Hop, Hop, please fuck off, Hop. This has become an over-done complaint over the past week but its true. He's a charisma black hole, he talks too much and his dialogue cannot be FFed through, he interrupts the natural gameplay flow before or after every gym. He's a putz who takes the Pokemon which is weaker than yours and is then shocked when you burn his Grookey up. Sonia gets away with being in a lot of cases simlar because she's a QT but from a purely analytical point of view, she stopped being relevant pretty quickly- half of her appearances might as well have been given to a signpost. I view with contempt the game just giving you a legendary in a cut-scene. That stuff used to be hard. Also, and this has been a complaint from G/S onward, but almost every legendary looks like crap. Its another dog, or its a digimon, can't it just be a fat ice eagle again?
Oh, and if Gigantomaxing is the game's main gimmick? Would have been better off without it. Nothing better than coming down to the last pokemon in a battle and, instead winning it through clever move use, winning it through retard strength from one of the one or two moves given to you. I thought the trainer challenges were okay, standard fare, some could have been expanded to full mini-games, others just a little time wasting.
I mentioned repeated character models above but really, it bares repeating on its own. In a 3D game like this, it doesn't make sense to walk into a hair salon and have it populated by two of the same very stylized character model. Or the league official, who pops up everywhere, often standing right next to himself. Also, not a complaint, but he looks just like a Mischief Maker...
Really, despite the game being rushed, it is still guaranteed to be one of the biggest games of the year, one of the biggest games on the system its on and as such its disappointing how many bells and whistles weren't put into the game. Very few minigames (only the cooking, which I had no interest in, camping which is suitable only for three year olds and the extremely basic bike rally.) If this was any other game, people would expect more. If Assassin's Creed only had twenty character models, if Mario popped in level objects a first down away from you, if Madden interrupted every game for unskippable moments with the other team's coach talking about how great he was while losing 50-3, people would rip it to shreds. Those games are all sold for the same price as Pokemon, and they all will, to varying degrees, sell less than it. They all come out every year, and yet they give more.
Also, its time for the Mareeple to wake up and realize that the whole multiple version thing is them fucking us. Setting aside the gym battles I won't get to have, or the Sir Fetch'd I won't get to catch, as an adult, I find trading to be less of a thing, I don't have a recess or lunch break with the target audience to trade with anymore and although online trades with strangers are a thing, how is that supposed to be fun and not frustrating? Thats what the multiple versions was for, back in the day, it was to encourage people to trade and talk about the game and thats not what gaming culture is like anymore. Even kids watch youtube now, we all know all of the stuff, we aren't going to need a friend at recess to tell us what about his Sword. I'm glad its still an option, but not being able to evolve my Haunter without trading is total fucking bullshit....
TL;DR: It was fun, wish it was better.
