My first sitting with Shield was six hours long, it ended with me popping back to the Pokemon Center after defeating the first gym. Yes, taking out the gym took me six hours of play time.
Shield starts off strong, we're introduced to Chairman Rose, an important business personality in the Galar region's Gym Challenge.
The Gym Challenge is pretty much the standard earn-badges-to-enter-the-league scenario but dialled up to eleven. It is very much portrayed how a highly regarded sporting event such as the World Cup would be, it's a nice take on something familiar and is handled much better than the attempted shake up Alola tried with the Island Trials.
The game actually makes a good first impression when you start playing it.
The graphics don't look as polished as Let's Go and the textures are trash across the board, but there is a lot going on to pull your eyes around the screen and distract you from the low grade assets.
This probably won't ring true for the majority of players, but as a Brit, I am hyper-sensitive to Galar as the setting for these games. Despite Sword and Shield being stylised renditions of the UK, there is a lot that feels familiar and homely to me and makes me feel somewhat connected to the region overall, I can't deny that GF have certainly done their research on the UK.
However, once I began to adapt to the southern Galarian countryside's aesthetic, Shield's shortcomings became annoyingly, irritatingly, and painfully clear.
There is inexcusable pop-in everywhere. Not just in the Wild Area, everywhere. Routes and towns are full of pop-in and it looks bloody atrocious. It makes Galar feel like a region of ghosts, with NPCs peeling in and out of the ether as you pass them.
My favourite video game is The Wind Waker, I can stomach entire islands popping into existence on a flat horizon, but in Shield it is somehow worse.
Places look abandoned until you start walking through them. Crowds of cheering NPCs and giant Pokemon like Onix suddenly spring into being as if they were always there and fade away again as if they never were.
It is horrid to look at, it gives the region a horribly artificial aura and it's distracting as hell.
All of this is before you get into the Wild Area, where these issues become even worse. There's pop-in everywhere from Pokemon big and small to roaming trainers and landmarks. If you thought the routes and towns leading up to the Wild Area were distracting then the Wild Area itself just exacerbates it all.
The textures in the Wild Area look even worse than those used in the routes and towns of the game. Stepping into the Wild Area genuinely felt to me like a dip in quality.
The way Pokemon behave in the Wild Area is horrible too. They mostly spring out of the ground for some reason or just appear above your head out of thin air. The Pokemon all gather together too instead of making use of the space of the Wild Area which is supposedly the size of two regions in Breath of the Wild.
The huddling of Pokemon can make it difficult to get to others that spawn within the clusters, which makes things more annoying than they need to be.
Pokemon also have a tendency to behave in… odd ways. For example; a roaming Onix got stuck in the ground and kept clipping through a nearby incline, a Xatu spun on the spot above my head for minutes on end like something out of a surreal nightmare until I distracted it and a Wingull got very intimate with one of the trees from OoT.
These moments were bad enough but even when the game was working as intended it still showed off just how little effort GF have seemingly put into this game.
For example, I was looking out over one of the lakes when a Gyarados spawned. It should have been a cool moment, but instead it was a miserable one as I watched Gyarados pivot and slither on the spot in the water without causing any ripples, wakes or waves as it moved. It was a simple model clipping through a surface with no sense of purpose.
It was a horrible reminder of the lack of polish GameFreak have given these games and made the Wild Area feel like something that was tacked on near the end of production rather than a concept the game was built around.
Also, despite having a 3D camera in the Wild Area, you can only pan left and right around your trainer and not look up and down. Instead, to get a better view of things, you have to toggle between the standard view and a slightly more zoomed out view which doesn't help much, especially when there are Pokemon circling your head… So GF can't even get a camera right.
The routes as a whole, beyond the Wild Area which link the towns together are really narrow and unfulfilling too, there's very little sense of player agency and free exploration just doesn't exist. There's only ever one way to go, even if that way is to a secret, you're not going to get lost on the way. Kanto had a much better sense of exploration and had moments early in the game where you could wander off the beaten path, but that just isn't here in S&S so far.
There are only ten routes in the game too…
I noticed lag with opening and closing menus too, nothing major but it was there and enough to notice.
The experience share that has been lifted right out of Let's Go is a mistake too. In the six hours I put into Shield, I used only one Pokemon other than Scorbunny once.
Pokemon go down fast in these games and moves hit hard, type advantages are pretty much one hit kills, but because every Pokemon gets experience for both catching and battling, I never need to cycle through my Pokemon because they're leveling up without my help.
As a result, I struggle to remember which Pokemon I have on me at times, but because I never need to change them it becomes a none-issue.
The raid battles are awful too. For whatever reason, despite having NSO, I couldn't find any human players to battle in raids with me.
Instead I had to use NPCs chosen by the game to help me take down some Swolemon and it didn't go too well because those AI companions were dumb as rocks.
The raid battles drag on as well and don't really yield any worthwhile results or rewards. You don't get experience for the battles, just hard to find or exclusive items and the chance to catch a Pokemon you probably already have, at least in the early hours.
Dynamaxing can feel hype sometimes when you trigger it, but actually fighting with it is a dull chore.
Animations are slow and the move pool is disastrously small. My Scorbunny had two fire attacks as standard but when he Dynamaxed those two different fire moves became the same Dynamax move, giving me a smaller set of attacks to use.
This small Dynamax move pool also reminded me that, for some reason, as well as cutting over 50% of existing Pokemon, many Pokemon attacks were cut too and simply no longer exist to use in Galar.
I also noticed that the background for battles would be somewhere different from where I was. For example, a fight with Hop in an industrial themed town, had the background of the game's opening hillside area.
There were also a handful of battles where there just wasnt a background at all, just a colourful void-like space for some reason...
The music is largely okay, it didn't annoy me, so that's something, but I can't remember any of it outside of the Gym Battle theme, which has already been on my iPod for months.
This is all without mentioning the constant interruptions from our friendly rival, Hop. I'm six hours in and Hop is still around almost every corner ready to run his mouth and talk to me like I'm simple. It's the early hours of Sun and Moon all over again. It made things incredibly tedious.
… There were times when I found myself having fun with Shield, getting hype at Dynamax and successfully catching the creatures that I wanted on my team. But every time I found something to enjoy I was reminded of how uninterested GF seem to have been while they were making this game.
Each successful capture reminded me that over 500 Pokemon are missing from this, the first original, HD, core, home console Pokemon game.
Each intriguing new area with NPCs peeling out of the ether reminded me of how poorly optimised the game actually is.
And each discovery I made in the Wild Area reminded me that GF's incompetency is excused because of the obscene amount of money the Pokemon IP makes by default.
So far Shield is half the game it should be with only a fraction of the polish it should have.
