It's been a few months since Z-A and my thoughts have changed

Yeah honestly I also found Z-A as a decent game at best, with it's price range not justifying the content and quality.

To be fair with Zs, only three Pokemon have access to X and Y Mega Evolution too.

hi

Back on the topic of the rest of the game, though, it was too bloated with grind. I did have fun playing it, I completed the base game's Pokédex and got a team of trained Lv. 100s and multiple shinies. However, the base game's post-game was partially locked behind ridiculous amounts of grind and partially locked behind half the price of a full game. If I want the same amount of post-game with almost no grind, I can replay SwSh anytime. Oh, yeah, remember back when the games were replayable? When the tutorials would never go beyond half an hour and you didn't feel like your eyebags were holding weights and trying to convince your eyelids to copy them every time you had to go through the tutorial? They introduced the game just fine in that amount of time and you actually felt like you were making progress during them. I miss when my big complaints were them saying undefeatable champion every two seconds, that plot twist makes no sense can we have full stories again, and why can't I use all the Pokémon I was allowed to use in the game before the one before this one. Also people made fun of a tree that looked low-quality.

Now we have games with even more plot twists on top of plot twists. Some of them were fun (I liked Holo-Canari being her grandpa supporting her, Canari being more distinct from Iono and "saying a bunch of symbols" after losing because she's a gamer, Lebanne being Lebanne and not a characterless NPC) and others of various levels of quality in execution felt like they were there just because they wanted to subvert expectations (Corbeau is "good" actually! Quasartico do literally nothing but tell you where Rogue Megas are! AZ just had a very long lifespan! The final boss isn't a Pokémon or person! Ingo is back and Emmet is also there, but we're not touching on that topic in any way at all!).

As for characters, the rival was my favourite because I already liked them before the Ange arc and I enjoyed it. I liked Lebanne and I feel bad for her. I also liked Jacinthe because she had the best design in the game with the game's best battle theme and had a fun personality and was a horrible person. Emma is obviously still one of my favourite characters in the series and I love her but wish we had more about her in this game. At least her design is one of the coolest in all of Pokémon.

Now, back to the story, but with a different topic. The game feels unfinished. It constantly brings up possible conflicts, like the mayor not knowing what he's doing and constantly approving Wild zones before they can finish studying the previous ones, giving Mable a lot of work in a high-stakes situation. And Wild zones in general. We can find a lot of NPCs complaining about them and struggling with them, but the topic is never touched on in a relevant way. There's one in a cemetry. They open up often until the tower is taken care of and they almost always are somewhere people hang out often, like parks, or include buildings. Which might include people's homes. And cafés are sometimes caught up in them. But this is never brought up by anyone. Plus, the technology used by them can be used by rich people like Jacinthe in ways they shouldn't be, but it isn't really acknowledged in-game in a relevant way. And there's the Battle zones, which definitely include people's homes given how many buildings we can go on top of, can put non-trainers in danger if they're outside at night, and have trapped one person in a mall overnight by blocking it away so trainers don't enter and in the process making it so no one can exit either. But that one person is the closest we get to anything on the Battle zones, though there might be a nameless NPCs I forgot who say some things because it's always the nameless NPCs and never anything important.

And sure, we can't do much about bad things in real life, but this is a video game series where we live in a near-utopian world with magic animals who help us with literally everything and you always play as the best trainer ever that everyone loves that no one could ever beat and people and Pokémon are best friends and it ends badly when they're seperated (see: all the Pokémon in Pokopia wanting their human friends back, humans crying and mourning not being able to be with their Pokémon, and real life being horrible, which would be fixed if we had Pokémon and a pure-hearted 11 year old who somehow has enough power to thwart criminal organisations and make everyone believe in the power of friendship so we don't end up a Rainbow Rocket villain's original timeline). I don't think that's a smart idea to put in a game with all that, as it makes it make no sense. Plus, it feels too pessimistic for a game marketed to children.

And now, the gameplay. The playtime is bloated by grind, but completing the Pokédex is so easy even I did it despite hating the mere thought of completing the Pokédex in every other game. But the shiny charm is basically locked behind the DLC unless you have a thousand hours in the game or have a method of AFK winning battles for hours and hours and hours, which has never been the case before now. It's a little disgusting. I did enjoy the exploration and running around and the fashion, at least. The battles were OK, but I hope they don't return. If I wanted to have real-time battles, I'd play a different series.

That's most of it, I think.