>>58463990
I love PMD's gameplay, but I also feel like it's at odds with the story, which significantly limits your playable roster (when from a Pokemon standpoint, teambuilding is a huge part of the appeal) and functions as a stealth massive tutorial before giving you free reign to do what you actually want. Explorers, for example, has a great IQ system in place that functions as a pseudo-class system to further differentiate Pokemon for teambuilding opportunities, but you're forced into the player/partner blowjob brothers duo for the first half of the game, and the grind to actually learn those skills is completely unreasonable in the main story's runtime, before the post-postgame just hands you Marine Resort and IQ Boosters to cap out any new party members quickly. Similarly, Super's Connection Orb recruitment system is severely limited during the main story (on my runs where I try to do every stackable mission within the story's timespan, I usually end up with around 160-180 of the 720-mon lineup before the ending), with a massive amount of the cast only being unlocked after the epilogue, implying that the real game begins in the postgame. RTDX is the only game that gives you full free-form partybuilding before the postgame (outside of select story beats), which I appreciate it for.
The story dungeons also handwave a good chunk of gameplay mechanics, since Level Resets are postgame exclusive and the meta progression means a lot of strategy before the postgame revolve around overbuffing the protag to facetank everything. I genuinely think PMD's one of those cases where the game aspect of the series only really picks up after you beat it. That said, I do like the world presented in the games so the story's a nice bonus.
>but what about custom starters?
Not a part of the devs' intended design, but this does mitigate some of the teambuilding issues.

>>58467522
You WILL get rehashed world ending threats, bad loredumps and godmode shonen powerups and you WILL like it