This was definitely my pleasent surprise game of 2015, excelling in pretty much all categorys, visuals (asside from animations), gameplay, and holy damn that music! This thread will probably be unnecessarily long, so wynaut listen to some of it's music as you read! Heres's one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usuKnzJLoHU (EDIT: Yep way too long lol, skip to last paragraph if you don't have the time) Anyway back to what I was sayin, even the story was overall pretty decent. A lot of great moments. dialogue was humurous or serious as needed, and most things had reasonable explanations. I can only say pretty decent though, because it definitely lacked in the character department, or rather it lacked characters with character.
About 30 or so Pokemon are relevant to the story, a ridiculously small number compared to the total number of them, and I feel like it's small by RPG standards aswell. Worse still, is how outside of those 30, the other 600+ Pokemon have no personality whatsoever. For instance literally all Pachirisu says in the whole game is "My cheeks and tail go zap!" and then when rescued "My cheeks have been crackling out of fear the whole time!" He's obsessed with his cheeks, what a cool character, hah sike. Wait, did I say he? There's not even any tell on it's gender, since the only way to know in this game is through dialogue. Sure doesn't help that they don't have actual names, they just go by their species. The rest have similarly cheesy one-liners, though admitidly some are funny, but the ones with references are annoying as it's like they're saying to play the past games if I wanna know what kind of personality they are.
Somehow the world itself has a similar problem. There's seemingly 7 continents in this game, yet 99% of the story takes place on one. That 1% is when you have to go to the Air continent that one time. Otherwise, you never have to go anywhere else, though you can, but not for any plot related reasons, and at the same time you really can't, because their dungeons are too high leveled. You'll have beaten the story already before you can start taking them on. Now of course most games have areas open up once you've beaten the game, so you could just say that's all just more post game content, but what postgame has 600% more than the main story? Regardless this is a detriment because now those areas aren't fleshed out. There's no events or happenings on the other continents, only the usual missions, so they all just feel the same and aren't memorable in the slightest. Really their only purpose is extra space since they probably couldn't fit all missions onto one continent without it looking like a jumbled mess.
With only a fraction of Pokemon and World utilized, the story feels small, way smaller than it could and should of been. So much potential there was, and with how slow the game started I thought it was gonna be a huge n epic adventure, but nah, it was just slow. 40 hours until you finally meet an enemy force who're intentionally causing harm to others, but even then it's just 5 Pokemon, 3 of which are the same species. I mean come on, even the evil teams in the main series had more numbers and diversity than that. There was potential for a side enemy, but nope they turned out to be a pawn for the main enemy, another missed oppurtunity. The rest of the game's bosses aren't really enemys, which isn't necessarily bad or anything, but it was pretty lazy how they used the same reason for fighting for three different bosses. I suppose that's better than giving ABSOLUTELY NO WARNING WHATSOEVER!!! *grumble*screwyoujiraichi*grumble*
tl;dr, the story's scope is too small. Now to get to my question in the thread title, we needa look at the obvious context. This game has 720 playable characters in it, I'm pretty sure there's very few RPGs or games in general that can say similarly. Is it really fair for me to bash on the aformentioned considering how impractical it is to create 720 interesting and unique characters? I completely understand that's why the game is the way it is. They prioritized getting every Pokemon into this game (except Volcanion because he sucks) which meant less resources towards fleshing out characters, and so not enough fleshed out characters to flesh out the other continents with. Still it can be said that they can spend more time on development and/or get a bigger team on it, but I don't know I'm not a developer so I could be oversimplifying things. Eitherway, this is definitely a flaw of the game that can theoretically be improved, so I'm going with yes it is fair, but feel free to say otherwise.
