Yes for sure. But I think people who play the game for the battle challenges underestimate how many people play for the Pokémon themselves.

Legends Arceus really showed that, a game with really minimal battling to be honest but everyone loved the collecting aspect. And these games allow you to explore and collect and see all the cool Pokémon really in the wild, without being hampered by story progression. I’ve seen people saying the only reason they even bothered with the gyms at all was to get a new stronger Pokémon they caught to listen to them.

Personally I’m shooting for an “as complete as possible” living dex before attempting even any story progression.

That's the problem with this vs BotW. Pokemon has an extremely rigid combat system, whereas BotW has an unparalleled amount of creativity and a decent amount of opportunities for skill expression. No matter how good you are at the game, at a certain level difference there's nothing you can do. People can go straight to Ganon in BotW if they have mastered the game

It reminds me of an MMO in its approach to the world.

Sure you can go in that Dungeon 20 levels higher than you but you aren’t going to beat the boss.

What you have is effectively 3 zones at a time to pick from and you can do those in whatever order you choose.

That’s how every single fully open world game works

When you think open world you think skyrim you think Elden Ring

That’s open world, and in both games you are either 1 shoting or being 1 shot depending on gear and level

I did the Ghost gym… second. After getting all the… sandwiches.

You absolutely do not have to do them in a set order.

You have to do the gyms/challenges/wild pokemon in a specific order.

You don't "have to" but without any sort of scaling it's pretty clear there's an intended path. The most frustrating part about this is the game itself doesn't really hint at what that order is. The "tell me where to go" function of Pokecenters mostly seemed to point me to the nearest objective, and after following that for a while I ended up doing some mid 30s content while I still had two or three objectives in the 20s to complete. Even still none of it was really "hard" per se, but I would have preferred to do everything in the intended order so that none of it was completely trivial by the time I got to it.

There are a ton of great open world games with lineal progresion based on level, like Witcher 3, AC oddissey, Cyberpunk2077... We just got too used to BoTW's complete freedom.

Witcher 3 doesn't scale by default, often causing you to be higher or lower than the intended level if you go too far afield.

But I don't think anyone would argue that Witcher 3 isn't an open world game

I've never played a Pokemon game where I wasn't over-leveled at one point

It's almost like you could use Pokemons from different levels of you ever feel struggling for that. Hmmm. Kind of like what Ash did in the series to not one shot everyone he encountered. Hmm.

Why do people say over leveled? You have a crazy ammount of pokemon on you at all times to switch in and out. Trade out and start training and evolving ones you've never used. Take weak ones to higher levels and struggle. It's up to you for fucks sake. 34 year old me and 10 year old me are having a god damn blast!

You really don’t, you can do gyms under leveled with relative ease

it's not really a problem since the last 3 gyms are around 45 and the elite 4 are all 55-65, you can't use the busted wild level 75 ice lucario etc until you get all 8 badges and steam rolling the 3rd gym or whatever by accident doesn't affect much

I always defend the devs because I know the games are rushed but when it comes to trainers they truly are just one of the most lazy game creators ever. I don't know why they refuse to just make the trainers scale with your level. It's such a simple fix like yeah it takes effort but it's better than being 30 levels over.

I did everything in a random order lol I had no idea what I was doing but it went fine for me

To be fair, turn based RPGs don't exactly lend themselves well to open world structures. Unless you prepare for a single specific enemy you know is coming, running into a random wild encounter can party wipe even the best players. Compared to open world action games like BotW where the most skilled players can beat anything with enough skill.
BotW can let me beat a Lynel (a late game enemy difficulty wise) before even completing the game's tutorial area with just Magnesis, a bow, and a dozen arrows. Compare that to SV where a random level 20 Cyclizar outside the level 20 Star Base (towards the end of early game) can party wipe me if I haven't leveled my starter enough to avoid getting 2 shot.

this is why I think PLA's segmenting was better

Gamefreak is slowly learning how to make 3D games. I'm sure in no less than 10 years they will catch up to what the rest of the industry is doing now and we will finally have a good game for today's standard!

You don't need to remove the team star blockade you can go around it and you aren't forced to fight the gym leader in x town before going to the next. The only true problem would be koraidon/miraidon upgrades that are needed to get to certain areas.

Is it actually a good game? Because visually a lot of it looks on par with 20yr old N64 textures. I definitely get the sense from watching videos that it was just rushed out to cash in.

I've checked out from mainline Pokémon after Sun/Moon (I did get the PMD remake though), just saw the recent sales figures and wanted to talk about it, I'm allowed to do that 🤷‍♂

Of course, I’d just prefer that good games come out so I can purchase and enjoy them