So now that I've played through the game and had some time to gather my thoughts, I'm going to go ahead and leave a review of the game.
This is perhaps the most controversial game we've ever had, blowing Black and White out of the water. The elephant in the room is obviously Dexit, and most of the debate rages around whether or not the improvements in graphics and gameplay justify Dexit somehow. No matter which side of the fence you're on, or whether you're sitting on the fence itself, Dexit is what we got and it's too late to change that. I've made my opinions on Dexit pretty clear in the past, and I see no reason to beat that dead horse anymore, so I'm going to leave it out of this review. This is a review of the final product as we got it.
I really enjoyed this game, and I think it marks a turning point for the Pokemon franchise to become far greater than we previously could have expected. This game makes massive leaps in terms of gameplay, graphics, and QoL features that, assuming they aren't dropped after this generation, will have a huge impact on the quality of future games in the Pokemon franchise. Raids are a fantastic way to tie cooperative PvE content into Pokemon in a way that it previously did not have. The graphics might not be Witcher III on Ultra quality, but they're miles ahead of the 3DS games. The world is beautifully crafted, putting the blocky, unnatural Minecraft-esque maps of previous games to utter shame. I love the minute details that add to the game's immersion. Random NPCs wander about, talking about nothing in particular but adding to the atmosphere. Street hawkers, record shops, and restraunts dot the streets of the various towns and cities you visit. The crowd cheers and chants while spectating your gym battles. Words cannot describe how much more immersive these games are than their previous titles. There are a ton of new quality of life features, such as being able to access the box system anywhere, being able to check the IVs of any Pokemon in your PC without needing to visit an NPC after obtaining the IV checker, and a variety of competitive QoL improvements such as nature mints and EV curries.
This game isn't perfect, however. The biggest disappointment to me was how much they oversold the scale of the Wild Area. The Wild Area is very cool and an amazing concept, but they made it sound massive. In reality, you can cross the entirety of it in about a minute. The various biomes within are rather small and often awkwardly placed. Wild Pokemon roaming the overworld is very cool, but they do so in every route, so the Wild Area isn't particularly noteworthy for it. Raids are incredible fun, but I don't like having to hunt down and defeat every single active Raid den before new ones will spawn, especially since some are located behind large rocks or in other places that make them difficult to spot sometimes. It wouldn't be so bad if they were marked on the map, perhaps. The other slight letdown was the pacing of the story, or uh... lack thereof. Honestly, I feel like there was a lot of the story that was simply cut out. There are characters that don't seem to serve much purpose, there's very little buildup to the main climax of the games, and the motivation of the villain is a bit of a head-scratcher to me (won't go into any details here due to spoilers, maybe in a later post). I think part of this game's story might have been cut out or condensed in order to get the games out faster, and I hope this isn't something we see in later games.
Those are fairly minor problems, and they (along with Dexit) honestly pale in comparison to not only what these games bring to the table for themselves, but also what they bring to the Pokemon franchise in general. They might be controversial, but ten years from now I think we'll look back at them as a huge step forward for the Pokemon series.