Pokemon Shield

Pokémon Sword and Shield is not only a worthy start for the series on mainline consoles, but is quite possibly the best entry in the series. With the new Pokémon, Dynamax raids, gyms, and the expansive Wild Area, Pokémon Sword and Shield filled me with a joy I rarely feel playing games.

Pokemon Sword and Shield's single-player experience is filled with neat characters and a new region that's brimming with personality, but running around the Wild Area with other players offers a special kind of fun. Quality of life improvements to the metagame, including the ability to change your Pokemon's nature and rent teams for fights, gives you good reason to stick with the game after you're crowned the new champion of the Galar region. Despite the controversy, Sword and Shield offers a great time.

While not the best title in the main Pokémon series, Sword and Shield manages to improve what is needed giving us a fun experience where capturing and fighting creatures feels simply great.

Sword & Shield is a really tricky Pokémon entry to pigeonhole. It retains the old Pokémon charm, but it's not without flaws.

Pokemon Sword/Shield is uncharacteristically user-friendly: now there’s no need to backtrack half across the world to heal your entire team of pokemon or to get to a particular city, for example. [Issue#242, p.66]

Pokémon Sword / Pokémon Shield hasn't brought much to the series in spite of sky high expectations. It's still an enjoyable ride along, in spite of the heavy clipping and the lack of challenge.

Pokémon Sword and Shield are not bad games. But fun character arcs and inventive, creative designs of new ‘mon are often offset by poor pacing and restrictive world design. The world of Galar is charming, and is a Pokémon interpretation of Britain I’ve dreamed of since I was a kid, but between gating what Pokémon you can catch behind Gym Badges, some half-baked route/City designs and a modest amount of post-game content, Sword and Shield can only be called ‘good’ Pokémon games… not ‘great’ ones.

It's not bad at all. The open areas feel actually great and i will not hate a game because of ONE LOW QUALITY TREE. The national dex is good, i just wish it had all the starters. Of course it's worse than z-a but i'd argue it's in the same level as scarlet/violet or even better. The story is, well, a pokémon story but no one plays pokémon for the story. I personally play pokémon for shiny hunting, so i didn't really like not being able to see if a pokémon is shiny until i battle them. The game isn't glitchy like Scarlet and Violet or Legends: Arceus. The colorful areas and especially the isle of armor are great and fun to explore. The animations kind of **** though. I have got to say grapploct and zamazenta are really cool pokémon and well executed concepts. This was actually my first pokémon game. It's not old enough to be considered nostalgic, but every time i play it i get a feeling of ALMOST nostalgia. I love this game though i know it's pretty bad in most people's opinions.

This game does NOT deserve a 4.8 rating this game is pretty good. yes the game has problems graphics could be better and the dynamax pokemon are legit just bigger versions of the pokemon which is incredibly boring however the game still has that fun exploration and fun turn based combat that the new games sadly scrapped.

After playing for 80 hours on a new save file, I don't think it's a perfect game, the base game is restricted with its legendaries and the post game story isn't the best thing either. Outside of that, I still think it had some good ideas and I still had a lot of fun with this one.

Baby hand holding simulator. Looks like an up res 3DS game. Limiting options. Can’t explore without someone telling me where to go. Worse Pokémon game to date. A shame because the setting was interesting

Summing up some bulletpoints on my thoughts of the game below, for reference this is after beating both ScVi 3 times and going back to SwSh after. I did not get / play the DLC as the base game offered so little there was no incentive to prolong this. Game is always on local wireless, this massively hinders connecting to wifi as it will frequently bug out and fail to connect to network after the game is open. This feels like a massive oversight for something that the developers forced on the game. Gameplay is very linear, moreso than Gen 2 and possibly even more linear than Gen 1 which is a very sad downgrade. The main story only took me roughly 20-24 hours to beat and the postgame did not offer much more; at what I feel was a moderate play pace. Postgame- After beating the game, gameplay massively falls off and feels very unmotivating. Farming the battle tower may appeal to some, but its gatekept behind needing to clear the BT for the currency (BP) to get the items that you need to clear the BT; which feels very outdated and counter-intuitive. You can clear all / most of the tower with provided rental teams which further detracts from the experience as by time you can make your own team with your own mons, you already beat everything. You can aim to complete the pokedex, breed, and shiny hunt; but this is nothing new or exciting from previous games really; and aside from team building for the BT it feels pretty pointless to build up mons. The game introduced raid dens, but they didn't feel at all appealing personally. Performance - I've encountered more performance issues with SwSh (~40hrs) than I ever did with ScVi (>1000hrs).