Pokemon SV
I don't have much to say about it and have been working through it slowly, but the new Pokemon is good. Definitely underbaked and probably suffers from being on Switch and not Nintendo's next console, but SV's underlying ideas are solid.
- Moving around the world is fun; I've seen critics complain that it's hard to know what you should be doing next, and this might be true if you simply ignore the several resources the game gives you for figuring it out.
- Granting that this was never going to happen, I would've been entirely happy if fighting and catching pokes worked like it does in Legends Arceus. Damn that was a good game. But they did a fine job of grafting normal Pokemon gameplay onto the large zone exploration stuff.
- Multiplayer in particular feels like a major step forward for people who aren't interested in competitive play (me), though it does leave me wishing there was more to do. Even just double battles out in the world or something.
- I know people have talked about this at length, but the character designs in this one are wild. Like characters from a 6.5 out of 10 anime from the transition to digital tools era. I find it charming.
The big question is, will SV do the impossible and inspire me to finish a Pokemon game? No idea, but I'm optimistic. It's already given me several moments of "no, surely they wouldn't let me do this," which isn't something I expect from Pokemon at all.