Reducing grinding is a good thing though. Otherwise you get a GSC/HGSS situation.
Grinding is RPG enemy #1!
Unless, of course, you're NIS or a fan of NIS, as they make RPGs catered to the weirdos who actually like to grind.
My guess is the online dynamix raids are going to be super popular. Especially amongst friends. Some people get very stressed out by anything PvP (for a variety of reasons) but a cooperative format is for a different and very large audience.
I’m curious how hard the hardest ones will be. Will you actually need to have well trained Pokémon with correct teams?
Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised with how popular Salmon Run was, and still is, in
Splatoon 2, a mode where four players cooperate to fight large amounts of weak (and not-so-weak) enemies. There are actually a good number of
Splatoon 2 players who play mainly Salmon Run.
I wouldn't be surprised if you have to transfer them from Go/Let's Go to Home and then to Sword/Shield and there is no other way to get them.
Neither would I. But I'd also expect them to suddenly just make Meltan and/or Melmetal available via easier means later on--not necessarily in this generation, but eventually, just as they made getting Spiritomb easier and how Mythical Pokémon are just outright given away at certain times online or via chain stores.
It probably won't be quite as extreme as Zorua showing up as an early-game wild Pokémon, of course. Or Deoxys becoming a postgame catchable in-game Pokémon.
They don't need the mobile market for this though. The fanbase naturally sees players coming and going as younger players buy the games for the first time and older players grow up and lose interest. Furthermore, the Switch has a built in new audience for Pokemon to appeal to with it being a hybrid console/handheld, longtime console gamers can now play a main series Pokemon game for the first time so that market is a prime source for new blood. There's no desperate need for the games to pander to a market that isn't really all that interested in them to begin with, especially in an environment where gamers want pretty much the exact opposite of what mobile gamers want. If Game Freak were smart and actually understood what console gamers wanted, they'd know that this was a bad idea to begin with.
They don't, but they probably want more money. That's really all there is to it.
What reviewers are you reading? Usually reviewers review games that they actually enjoy. As for why, well they always rate Pokemon games highly regardless of quality. They're probably either just really obsessed with Pokemon or getting paid off by Game Freak to give it a good score.
Professional reviewers. From what I can gathe,r it's the same as the journalists who go to events like E3, PAX, Toyko Game Show, and so forth in that, due to the nature of their job, they have to play many, many games continuously throughout the year and can't really spend much time with any one game unless they get a real personal attachment to it (upon which they, well, play it during their non-working hours). There were many complaints from fans of
Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled, for example, in that the reviewers, if they had videos of it, were playing poorly; this is most certainly because that game has a boost mechanic that requires weeks, if not months, to get right, but the reviewers have likely only played for a day or two at most, and, unsurprisingly, they had little to no grasp of that boosting mechanic.
That's what I think is happening with reviews of
Let's Go. If they're played by people who are into RPGs, they may not have played any Pokémon games for more than a day or two, or they may not have played them at all.
Let's Go provides a simplified experience, with stripped down mechanics. It is, to use something probably cliché by now, Baby's First Pokémon Game, which meshes well with a number of these reviewers working for magazines, websites, and general entertainment publications (the last of which may by the ONLY person on staff who plays video games). I've also seen a bunch of reviews from people who hadn't played since Generation I, and it seems to have appealed to them quite well, with praising of the "traditional mechanics" and "going back to its roots."
The divide between professional reviewers and user reviewers is pretty stark on Metacritic;
the professional score is 79 out of 100, while the user score is a harsher 6.1 out of 10. The score breakdown is also different between them, with a roughly 3:1 ratio of positive-to-mixed with no negative reviews at all (5 out of 10 is the lowest it gets) while user reviews are about 1:1 between positive and outright negative.
Which is a mistake, operating based on what one market thinks and giving the rest the middle finger is just not smart business. If you're not looking at the bigger picture you're leaving money on the table.
It's not so much as "giving the rest the middle finger" as much as I don't think Game Freak is aware that gaming culture is different outside of Japan compared to what's within Japan. That is, it might be that their apprehension of releasing expansive DLC is not because Japanese players don't care, but they might think nobody cares. This is a mistake even big megacorporations make when selling things to foreign markets: They assume everywhere else functions just like them.
A good example is pizza in China. Dairy is rarely used in Chinese cuisine, and a lot of people in China, subsequently, never built up lactose tolerance. The result is that cheese is indigestible for many Chinese, at least in earlier decades. In addition, tomatoes are rarely used too, which are seen as weird and offputting there. Bread is the most familiar of the core parts of a pizza, but that is considered a novelty food. As a result, pizza would have a hard time succeeding in China. Pizza Hut pulled it off by sending people there to do culinary research for a year, with Pizza Hut's bigwigs accepting their findings no matter how weird it is. Pizza Hut's Chinese menu is drastically different from what you might expect pizza to be like, with toppings like corn and/or roast duck, and with the options to replace the cheese with mayonnaise or (regular) tofu and the sauce with familiar Chinese sauces like hoisin sauce or char siu glaze. (They also apparently quite like Thousand Island dressing for the sauce.) By adapting pizza to Chinese tastes, Pizza Hut has since become a part of Chinese culture, and domestic chains soon popped up. On the flip side, Domino's fell for that fallacy of "What the locals like must be what the world likes" and sold their pizzas completely unchanged. Domino's never found an audience in China--criticism of Dominos quality aside, very few were willing to even try it, and it has had minimal presence in China since.
(Or, for a simpler pizza-based example, Americans thoroughly reject
frutti di mare pizza despite it being one of the staples of its home country of Italy.)
Well, there's a couple of ways they could go about doing that. One, they could have the events trigger in different places based on your intended gym order. Two, they could make some of the character development part of optional events. Three, they could just not bother with those kinds of plots at all. One thing you have to keep in mind with Pokemon plots is that the storyline surrounding the evil teams tends to be disconnected from the core premise. You're a trainer out on an adventure to catch Pokemon, battle them, and compete in the Pokemon League. The evil teams' apocalyptic plots involving the legendary Pokemon tend to be unrelated to all of that (the only exceptions being BW, and from the looks of it, SwSh), so that aspect of the formula is very expendable. So they could easily overhaul the plot to accommodate open world game design without compromising the series' identity.
I suppose you're right--in a theoretical example of a full free-roaming Pokémon game, they could build a story with that in mind. I don't think
Sword and Shield will go full open-world though. The success of
Breath of the Wild has influenced some major Switch games, most notably
Super Mario Odyssey, but as it stands, the narrow shape of the Galar region and the large number of side characters suggests to me it'll be limited, perhaps until the postgame. (This may, again, tie into Game Freak's Japanocentrism--Japanese gamers tend to prefer linear games where the player character is pushed along by the plot. For instance, none of the Mass Effect games have succeeded in Japan; what western gamers see as moral choices that affect the story, Japanese players see them as "They give me too many decisions, and I don't know which one is the right one for the story!")
For the record, Sabrina, in
Let's Go, seems to be intended to be fought as the 6th Gym Leader. That is, the game strongly suggests you fight Erika, then Koga, and then Sabrina, based on the levels of their signature Pokémon and the increasingly high requirements needed to access their Gyms. It's a much more pronounced difference than the three of them in the original Game Boy games, where their levels were close together, as were those of all of the trainers in central and southern Kanto.
