By far the most exiting thing announced during Friday's Pokemon presentation was Pokemon Legends Arceus.

This is a massive, open world Pokemon game where you venture out into the wild and explore and find Pokemon living in the world.  It looks like Pokemon meets Breath of the Wild, and the trailer was trying to give Breath of the Wild vibes with certain shots.  This seems to be the game many of us wanted Sword and Shield to be, from the graphics being a huge improvement to the freedom and openness of the game.

That said, there are some problems.  The world seems pretty barren, with very few Pokemon on screen at any one time and no large Pokemon shown off to give off a sense of awe.  In addition, the framerate is bad, with some Pokemon looking like they are moving in single digit framerates.  Hopefully this is because they showed off an early unoptimized build since the game is at least a year away, but given Gamefreak's history of being unable to push whatever hardware they were working on there's plenty of reason for concern with the graphics.

This is the big leap forward I've been waiting for!

Let's wait and see what we actually end up with here before getting too excited. It seems cool in theory, but what we've seen so far..... If this was just some random new IP, we'd say it looks like crap.

I have to give it to GF, this is the most ambitious project they've taken on thus far. But ambition only gets them so far, they still haven't proven they can tackle anything of this scale (just look at SwSh performance and the state of the Wild Areas), so they really have to step up their game if they want this to be a success. Maybe that's the reason why they're outsorcing the DP remake, to focus on Breath of the Arceus, but how effective that will be, only time will tell.

Also, they better bring all pokemon back this time.

On paper, sure.

But as you point out, the world looks barren, there's not much there in terms of gameplay, and the performance leaves a lot to be desired. What I watched doesn't look fun to play, so it's hard to get excited.

I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, as I know fans have been clamoring for this open world concept for a long time. But an open world alone doesn't mean a great game.

I don't know, they've barely shown anything yet. The world and the mechanics seem like a watered-down version of Breath Of The Wild, and we haven't seen any interesting combat yet either. So far, the only reason to be excited for this is the fact that it has Pokémons in it.

I totally don't trust Game Freak so I'm skeptical

Hopefully. Let's hope that their good intention translates into a good game.

My only concern right now is its performance. Hopefully, it'll have a lot more optimization by the time it's out next year.