#iozoneposts

As I said before, I find the writing to be very underwhelming. Apparently this is a somewhat common consensus between hardcore or more dedicated fans. The characters are actually fine, it's just that the story around them doesn't really bring them to their full potential. I get they wanted to be more realistic by locking you out of the loop, but sometimes too much realism can hurt a story.

I'm not a level designer but... Something about the route design seems... Underwhelming? I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the budget went into the wild area.

The human characters are very expressive and exude lots of personality. While I do appreciate later games for touching up on the Pokemon models and animations, the way they go about the human characters here just hits Different, you know?

The designs of the human characters are just good in general. It's nice seeing alternate takes on common Pokemon classes such as the hiker and fisherman. Their looks alone really do say a lot.

It is nice seeing how the opinions of the NPCs change as you move up in the Gym Challenge. It's heartwarming and makes the world feel more lived in.

I don't believe the devs are lazy, but you can tell they had to make compromises to accommodate for being on a super underpowered console. Not really helped by having big Pokemon as a gimmick, I'm sure. I guess they wanted to show what a Pokemon game on the Switch can be? Then again, the debut games were never really the strongest of their generation. Diamond and Pearl went through development issues and had to have Platinum to patch things up.