Pokémon Sword (2019)

This is a game that hits exactly on the 3-star mark for me. It was good. It helped me relax. Nothing about it irked me, but nothing challenged me either. Probably the most difficult part of this game is living with the guilt that you effortlessly crushed Hop's and other trainers' dreams over and over again.

My favorite bits? The music, the localization, and the town design, all of which were REALLY good. The British English dialogue consistently cracked me up, the music felt so right in every situation, and I want to spend the rest of my life in Ballonlea.

Yet, many parts of the game felt uninspired to me: the story, the Wild Area (it felt so empty to me for some reason), and the battling in general. Maybe I'm just getting too old and have played too many Pokemon games at this point, or maybe it's because I've started playing Hearthstone recently (where the CPU is actually smart), but the unfair advantages you get with battling in this game and other Pokemon games is starting to get to me in a way that doesn't make winning ever feel rewarding.

I would say that due to the good points of Pokemon SWSH, it was worth playing for me, but as soon as I beat the story + main post-game content, I was quite ready to move on.

*Note: I don't have an Online subscription, so I wasn't able to do everything in the game. Maybe raiding would have been fun?

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this Pokemon game. I've been a fan since the Pokemon Blue days, and this is probably one of my favourites. It's also the first game that I have completed the Pokedex in since Blue. Initially, I had concerns like others about them leaving out many Pokemon from this game. However, this made completing the Pokedex very achievable and therefore a much more enjoyable experience. I didn't miss any Pokemon - there are still 400 to collect and use and it allowed me to use some Pokemon that I normally wouldn't have.

The pacing of the game is a little different to most other Pokemon games, as the first 3 or 4 badges take quite a while to collect. But it also means that the variety of Pokemon that you have a chance to catch early on in the game is significant. This was a big improvement on past games, some are still rare and only available late game as they should be, but your choices for using in the first couple of gyms is very broad. It has come a long way from taking on Brock with your starter, a Pidgey and a bug.

I enjoyed the Raid battles and Dynamaxing, however I do wish they would stick with a concept, as mega evolution and Z moves have come and gone and I feel like it would be good to stick with 1 of those options long term. As always, I wish the main story provided a little more challenge and diversity, but I think a lot of the quality of life changes they made really helped spread out some of the monotony of previous games. Not having to go back to a computer to swap out Pokemon is great and they really make levelling up new additions to your team easy and quick.

The best feature in my opinion is having the Pokemon in the overworld. It's crazy that it's taken this long for that to happen, but I'm really glad that experiment from Let's Go made it across to Sword and Shield as it really makes it feel like a Pokemon filled world, as it should be.

The online system is a little bit janky, but it functions well enough - I think it will probably get better over time when they activate Pokemon Home in 2020. That being said, it's unfortunate that wasn't available to launch with the game.

All in all, I enjoyed this Pokemon game more than I thought I would, and I'm glad that I was able to complete the 'Dex just by trading with 1 friend. I would recommend it to any Pokemon fan, even if you're upset about the Dexit, as it really improved the game in my view. Hopefully the next instalments continue to build on this great base!

I love raids and shiny hunting. The story is more than I would expect from a Pokemon game, and all the characters are so adorable and amazing. After completing the Pokedex I didn't even care about the whole dexit, because let's be honest, completing it is a lot of work for someone who doesn't transfer pokemon from version to version.

But oh man... we have around 400 pokemon in current dex for S&S, and NO option to sort them in our box according to dex number or element, select multiple ones without them being arranged next to each other, or ANY way to sort them except manually. I'm sorry but you just can't expect people to manually move every single pokemon in 20 boxes when you have so many of them. This is not a quality of life feature, it is a necessity for a future pokemon game.

My second complaint would be about refreshing stamps. I mean, I can use the surprise trade trick, but why make people find and use workarounds instead of just make the refresh option appear more often? And I want to have a streamlined method of going from raid to raid and finding ones I want

If not for that, WOW is Pokemon S&S a great game. The raids, gigantamaxing, fun characters. 60 hours went by in a flash! and it will be probably 60 more :D But is it a nostalgia from 1998 keeping me afloat, like 6 million other people, or is it objectively a good game? we will probably never know.

My first Pokémon game played to the finish since Gold/Silver and overall had a great time with it. My experience was dampened by the lacklustre story and uninteresting characters barring a select few along with some pretty horrible visuals for the times we are in, but everything else from the soundtrack and exploration to battles and hunting Pokémon kept me enticed and every single one of those Gyms were a pleasure to conquer! Add in the fun raid battle's and it's easy for me to not let the negative areas cloud my judgment too much.