The issue with game criticism as a whole is that it’s wildly subjective, much more so than people pretend it is. Also much more so than the review industry lets people believe thanks to bandwagoning. Also, pessimism tends to reign in critical world, as it’s a really lazy way for critics (mainly amateur critics) to make dumb people think they (the critic) know what they’re talking about—it’s much easier for a dumb person to call out the bullshit on an optimistic take than it is to call it out on a pessimistic take.

When it comes to overblowing small issues, they take a 98% full glass of premium cask whisky and claim it isn’t as good as the glass of cheap beer that’s 100% full. Games are bigger and more complex these days, a few glitches (many of which you have to try to get) that take a lot longer to track down and fix. While it’s true, there are your Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wilds that seem relatively clear of all classes of bugs, those are the exception. A company can dump all sorts of cash into development, but there are only so many top tier resources to go around. The thing about Pokémon is it’s fairly iterative, so when it’s done it’s transition to modern visuals, later games are going to have most of those glitches ironed out, and QA/engineers will become more aware of what to look for as they gain experience.

AnywY, I haven’t played the game, I’m not a fan of Pokémon, but this post brings up the same story as general problems with the criticism industry.

Im happy Nintendo is offering refunds

Seems like the complaints were big enough for them to not ignore what's happening

Nintendo is never happy to be associated with low quality products. The perceived quality Nintendo games are good is how they manage to keep them full priced forever. So this time they may finally act and provide Gamefreak the right support to, at least, meet some quality standards

I thought that as well, but I did check couple years ago and there were quite a bunch of low metacritic games published by Nintendo on the last couple gens.

Problem is that this game will likely still be full price years down the road.

There was but overall those are games that have lukewarm reviews because of boring gameplay or little to no innovation. Switch sports is considered by many a shit game (me included), but it's because I'm not the target audience of this game. The target audience think the game is at least a bit good, same goes for ones like Mario Party 

But this Pokemon game is a bit different, it's having bad reviews even from its own target audience

Oh ya, that is already a given since the MSRP for Nintendo games never go down.

They do sales every now and then but its mainly retailers, not from Nintendo/eShop itself - mainly for Pokemon (recently Nintendo themselves do Zelda/Mario and other IP sales).

A quote I saw on Twitter puts my thoughts on this best. To paraphrase

"This game is really fun when people aren't shouting about how buggy it is'.