Thread by @NotBrunoAgain

Anyway I finished the main story in Legends Arceus and I can say pretty confidently that this is likely a #goty list game for me

It's basically someone looking at the Pokemon franchise and asking, pretty mercilessly, "is this actually fun to do"

Being something between a spinoff and a main series game, it's able to just end so many seemingly immutable things about the franchise in the name of convenience.

The pace of play is drastically faster, as I've pointed out before. But it's not just that; there's an attitude of actual approachability that permeates this in the way that other pokemon games aren't.

Like in sword and shield, pokemon can freely re-learn forgotten moves. But it goes a step further: Pokemon movesets are loadouts you can change on the fly.

While this game does have pokemon trading, it also has an item (the "linking cord" which looks like a GBC link cable) that evolves pokemon that ordinarily evolve by trading. Really, nothing is sacred, and that's for the better.

There are a few things to gripe about. The game is very conservative with its complexity budget- it adds a bunch of new systems and replaces a bunch of old ones. So to conserve complexity it does away with both held items and pokemon abilities

This is something that pretty much can't be carried forward, I think. Some pokemon are so defined by their abilities they'd be outright nonfunctional without them, so getting rid of abilities only works if you're dodging all cases like Shedinja and such

Visually this game is ROUGH. Not because it's technically unproficient, but because the level of detail and care in the environmental art just isn't there in large swathes of the open world.

For the record, when I say "open world" think something the size of Monster Hunter Rise (a game this one extremely resembles in several ways). This is not like a gigantic open world game with a map the size of West Virginia, it's a set of five (large, open-ended) levels.

Pokemon battling also takes a major backseat here and it's definitely the case where if the battles weren't very fast to resolve they'd become very dull as there's not a lot of room for complexity or interesting interactions

So this is a thing where if you care about that optimization aspect of pokemon games that's not as fleshed out here

The battle system is basically a from-the-ground-up rebuild that is probably only possible here because there's no PvP mode to worry about

Stats and numbers have been entirely rejiggered and the level curve is way, way flatter. In normal pokemon a 10-level difference is insurmountable; here it's really not a big deal.

This is kind of a necessity of the open-world design, really. There's a lot of soft gating and every map has low/mid/high level areas built into it, so it can't rely on the very strict progression of a normal pokemon game to keep players in band relative to wild pokemon

But also, the fundamental mechanic of pokemon battles has been chucked! You no longer make a simultaneous choice before both pokemon get to act. Instead now you take normal turns, choosing your action right before it happens.

Speed now factors into a somewhat hidden calculation of "action speed" where if you take faster actions (using moves that would be priority moves in a normal pokemon game, eg) you may get to take more turns than your opponent

It's ultimately a pretty messy and way less readable system. Type matchups overwhelm stats and level more than they already did. Speed is even more invaluable.

I don't think this battle system can carry forward into a theoretical future game with a PvP mode without a lot of refinement and rebalancing, really. I'm not sure it's meant to.

To sum up this very long thread: I think this game is worth playing, especially if you've fallen off the pokemon wagon. It is neither perfect nor a clear direction for the future of the franchise, being as it's full of limitations and contingencies.