The story involves you going on a trip to France, and then someone picks you out to promote their hotel and forces you into their friends group and never lets you have any agency at all for several hours.

When you do get some free reign, you're confined to small playgrounds called "Wild Zones" that have at most 7 or 8 unique species in extremely predictable spawn points.

You send out a Pokémon to spam any of its four attacks until you defeat it, and you can throw a Poké Ball at the already defeated Pokémon (a series first), with the caveat that you don't get further chances to catch it. However, a defeat plus a catch rewards more EXP than just catching it, or just defeating it, so you should always throw a ball after defeating something.

You also have to dodge roll out of the way of attacks occasionally, which is when you can't command your Pokémon so you need to watch for opportunities to attack. Annoyingly, instructing your Pokémon to attack always calls it to your side instead of letting it attack from the position it already has.

There's a lot of issues with this game and the magic that was in Legends Arceus just isn't here from what I can see. The music is pretty nice though, and exploring the environments is nice despite the very obvious problems with the buildings being all flat billboards.

>>58433160
I feel that.