Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

I'll make this fairly simple, I once was a massive pokemon nerd. I've played every pokemon game (main titles) from pokemon yellow to black apart from silver and platinum, despite the better graphics, changes to battle animations and some new features, I found this to be the worst pokemon game I have played so far, but if this is a first pokemon game for you, you will find this game to be great as you wont understand most of the issues I had with the game.
My main issue with this game is the new generation feels somewhat rushed and lack the character that older generations had. I realised this when I was battling a candle with an ice cream and when I could see similarities in the design for the starting water pokemon from the 4th and 5th generation.
The game did briefly distract me from this disappointment by introducing me to possibly the most expansive pokemon land yept, with sky rise buildings to large luscious forests, caves are dark and dangerous and some of the usual exploring, puzzle elements still offer a nice detour from battles. But a number of locations are just little sight seeing tours for the main story, which is almost exactly the same to every previous game.
Pokemon, I'm aware, is not a game known for epic story telling, but it is essentially the same character types through every title. There's you, the silent protagonist, your neighbour or rival that will take the opposite type and challenge you at various points throughout the map, and an evil force you have to battle against because they're probably not being very nice to their pokemon. It is your job to beat the eight gym leaders and be known as the best pokemon trainer in the land etc. I do moan about this formula not changing, but I suppose it's part of the series to have these factors in the game. Like a sort of tradition.
Another thing that has stuck with the series is the slow text scrolling, even at maximum speed it just crawls across the screen. Speaking to various people such as the pokemon centre assistant will spark her to ask you how your day is, and it's likely that this little feature to add realism won't involve you in the game and will cause you to spam the A button. At speed, the character's movement feels clunky still, and somewhat restricted. The hyped battle animations that came with this game add very little to overall game play but admittedly does intrigue to see what the animation will be, but I did wonder why this animation improvement couldn't have been done in an earlier game like Diamond or Heartgold. There was also a little excitement for 3 on 3 battles, but there is literally one battle in the whole game that uses this system.

I played this game when it came out last year, and to be honest, I don't remember of it. I remember playing through and coming up with the criticisms above, but this game overall felt like it was missing the character and life the other games had. Sure it had lovely environments, nice animations and a few new interesting ideas, but I really think the series should end now in terms of main games. It had a good formula, its got many fans across a decent number of generations but now the wrinkles in the series are starting to the point where I think further games would just ruin it.