Omg I'm screaming I was sweeping some kid with Eiscue Ice Face and he got salty and quit lmao

That's the most fun I've had online tbh, for some reason every team has either Dragapult or Rotom Wash, or both, and it's getting boring :') I mean Dragapult I get, it's cool af but Rotom??? Is this 2009??

I liked the storyline, it was like playing the anime! It was nice to actually go through the journey with your rival like I said.

I do agree about the gyms though, like Aaron said last page it definitely feels like they kind of gave up or ran out of time in places, it's not even towards the end as I think the league and story around it was brilliant and the postgame wasn't too bad given X and Y and Sun and Moon had basically nothing on that front. I feel like they were rushing with time to get a game out each year and that meant that some things suffered, namely bits of the story and the gym challenge. I love that they made the gym challenge such a spectacle with everyone watching and it being in a stadium, but what I found odd was that you had all this hype of Raihan being amazing and Leon seeing him as a rival, not many people being able to beat him... and then you just get an empty gym and "wow he does double battles!11!1" The Spikemuth one kind of made sense for the story of Team Yell, but Raihan's was just bizarre. Literally just "battle these three trainers then me", when we had actual puzzles, quizzes and challenges the whole rest of the way through.

I still think the games are brilliant, all things considered, but just imagine with the extra year of development if they skipped Let's Go and put the effort into SwSh, how amazing they'd have been!

I've not battled Raihan yet but I kinda' suspected it'd be equally as uneventful. Spikemuth just left a bad taste in my mouth because I LOVED the theme of the town, it reminded me of the old Sega side-scrolling brawler games like Streets of Rage. It was just such wasted potential, which seems to be a recurring theme with Pokemon this era.

Your last comment is so on-point. I genuinely enjoyed the first half of my run more than any official Pokemon in a long time, but they dropped the ball hard in the latter half. There's so many great things but just about everything lacks polish. Imagine a game that incorporated the open-world/co-op aspect of the Wild Area for the entirety of the playthrough? It's a bit embarrassing that that seems like such a pipe dream in 2019, but hey ho. I'm at least slightly optimistic going forward, because they did seem to make some strides towards bringing Pokemon into the modern era. Like you said, they really ought to stop with the yearly release cycle and especially with the cash-grab 'sequels' that are effectively the same game repackaged with a few cosmetic/mechanical alterations, because SwSh could've been legitimately fantastic with more development time (and a full dex).

I've had such U-turns on Eiscue and Cinderace I remember them leaking and me being like jesus christ what the f*** but the former is so fun to use because of the form change if Hail comes back, it's fun to have to adapt if you switch a couple times, and to see if the other team can deal with it. I've nearly swept a team four times with it, the nearly only being because I got a salty disconnect each time I've been doing similar to what I did with Mimikyu's Disguise/Swords Dance last gen, I use Ice Face to get a free Iron Defence off if I can see the team is likely to be physical, then I've still got great defence even when the Ice Face goes down. It's kind of a novelty type gimmick 'mon but I just love it The confused lil' penguin face is adorable too.

Being 20 minutes long, I've just seen that hat's the longest Pokemon Direct which is v interesting I'm trying not to get my hopes up for those Sinnoh remakes but when it's that long it can't just be Pokemon Home/Sleep can it??