Good
- Open world made the world feel bigger and more adventurous
- the wild pokemon were done really well. They act like wild animals and would approach you and be aggressive, curious or passive. Some would dig underground to reach you, and voltorbs would self-destruct. Good how they retained the pokemon's traits. The models all looked good, as well as their animation. Being able to sneak attack them with a pokeball was cool.
- the transition from wild encounter to battle was seamless
- the attack animations were decently animated.
- the music was great. The tera battles during gym fights made the fights feel epic.
- traversing with my wheel pokemon felt better and better as I got more upgrades. Flying across the region felt great.
- Being able to fly and surf quickly was great.
- The way the storylines converged at the end and watching all the friends come together to solve a the final issue was great. It made the characters matter. Also, the sad outcome for Arven's story was a nice touch and surprised me.
Bad
- the draw distance is pretty terrible, and there isn't anything really interesting to do in the towns
- can't turn off battle animations
- No voice acting made the cutscenes feel weird a lot of the times. The dialogue itself sounded unnatural often. People don't talk like that in real life.
- Team star getting bullied and skipping school to form base camps is really far fetched and too bizarre. Would they have this many followers if they were getting bullied in school? It doesn't line up.
- random NPCs would sometimes walk in the middle of a pokemon battle.
- Not enough trainer NPCs that want to battle. They are easy to miss if you go off course, and don't explore too much. This means by end game, you have to do a bit of grinding.
- Many of the missions outside of battles felt bland and unimaginative. Like the mini challenges you have to do before a gym fight. Chasing the titans constantly was kind of boring. Defeating 30 pokemon before every team star boss fight was repetitive and mindless.