Were Pokemon Sword and Shield as bad as we thought?

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I thought retaliate was just a throw away move, but it has one of the coolest animations I've ever seen in a pokemon game. The range in quality is crazy.

I can understand how much these games did from a competitive perspective, but the single player experience was extremely lackluster. Story and exploration especially were really bad for an RPG...

5:58 Fun fact: If your defense stat is 0, then physical attacks will only ever do 1 damage to you due to how the damage formula works

I personally really enjoyed Sword and Shield. I liked that there was no elite four but instead a tournament to make it seem more immersive and less like a video game and more like your journey in an anime or something

The wild area was a great concept executed poorly. having the DLC be basically a giant wild area was a huge improvement

I actually loved the Calyrex story, he felt more like an actual character than just another side quest to catch another legendary

20:12 "Have a pokemon from your childhood you wanna play with again??? Trade it up to sword and shield -" Yyyyyyeah.... my favorite pokemon is Mismagius.... Sooooo....

The route design wasn’t “fairly linear” it was atrociously so. Even Gen 2 routes felt like there was more to do haha

So something Wolfey didn't touch on that honestly made me genuinely furious during my first play through of Pokemon Sword was the caves.. or lack of. There's 2 caves in Galar. Both of which are accessible within your first 3 badges. They're both REALLY short caves, with the second one being a dead end because it's just used for an introduction to Kabu. My biggest gripe about this is WHY IN THE NAME OF ARCEUS DID THEY GIVE US THE ESCAPE ROPE AS A KEY ITEM?!?!? What purpose does it serve when initially, the caves are so short the Escape rope isn't needed and any other time if you're lost somewhere like the Glimwood Tangle, YOU COULD JUST CALL A DANG TAXI

I love the aesthetic of SwSh. Making pokemon battles feel like a sport was perfect. My biggest problem with it was just how boring and linear it was. Edit: I feel i should expand on my comment lol. I dont think Linear is bad. Im sure we can all name games that are linear and phenomenal. But i feel if a game chooses to be linear it should offer more than what SwSh gave us. And comparing a game that came out 3 years ago to a game that came out 20 years ago doesnt help your argument lol. Gaming and storytelling has evolved since then and sometimes it feels like Gamefreak knows we're going to buy the games so they cut corners

dear lord this generation has created such a massive split in the community in one hand, people really enjoyed this game and liked what it did on the other hand, people seem to despise it so much that they even tell people that enjoyed this gen to go play the older games instead

My main issue with SwSh os that it was a total of $189 for both games and their dlcs for an experience that feels like we would've payed $80 for just a generation prior

It's extraordinarily refreshing to see a video that is fairly positive but not toxic, you were clearly not afraid to voice your dislikes and yet you painted a very fair picture of the games while also just explaining what you did like in a way that was very enjoyable and digestible. The lack of hostility is something a lot of modern Pokémon reviews these days lack, so I really enjoyed this video!

I wish they would finally just give a bunch of time towards developing a game. They have the true potential to make Pokemon a mindblowing exprience.

The pokemon company lied and said they didn’t include the full pokedex because they were focusing on improving the quality of animations and models. Many people were excited about this, and were obviously angry when they found out they were the same models they made in 2012.

A lot of issues like animation and design of the areas don’t even necessarily need more time. Like, you could literally just hire more people to do it. Have teams of animators work on specific Pokémon. Hire more designers and have different ones work on different areas with directors making sure there’s some level of cohesion. Obviously there’d still be some bottlenecks with actually tying everything together, but just employing more people to do the work would seriously mitigate all the “issues” that are holding the series back. There’s very little reason all these devs are forced to crunch and the games need to feel rushed. Just hire more employees, you’ll still make a disgusting profit

In terms of voice acting, they could just take the Zelda approach and have them grunt. They already give grunts to the Arceus protags so it wouldn’t seem too hard. Probably a lot cheaper to have VAs just grunt for an hour compared to more complex dialogue

One complaint I have with Pokémon Sword and Shield that I don't hear enough people talk about is not being able to save and share battle videos. This was a standard feature with the Vs Recorder in the DS and 3DS games and I miss it.

my biggest irk with exp share is that it shares evs during training. i wouldnt mind if it just gave pure experience but if i just need one mon to have 56 def evs i dont wanna go through a bunch of party management or do unnecessary bag rummaging. small thing i know but i gotta press A/B enough in these ganes already