I figured out why I love PLA but hate SV!

I think that games should be cohesive. Obviously fun first, but it should make sense.

Imo, everything about Legends Arceus makes sense to me. There are very few trainers because people are afraid of Pokémon and Hisui is barely getting settled. Tbh the rest of this is more theorizing, but here goes. Frostbite instead of Freeze is a thing and flinching isn't a thing. I think this makes sense because Pokémon were less tame, the environment was harsher, and they couldn't afford to just skip turns or be unable to do anything. Their aggression makes sense as well.

Pokémon movesets are more constrained and they don't have abilities yet. To me, that feels like their battling was less specialized because it was just about survival. Just hit things or try to get away. Nothing fancy yet.

There is probably more, but in general, I don't think anything stood out as "wtf" in a bad way to me. Well, some of the characters were kind of weird.

I liked the plot twist as well. I'm going to be honest, I don't play Pokémon for the story, so the plot rarely stands out to me.

The gimmick here is Strong and Agile-style moves. This felt natural and not really like a gimmick at all.

I also like that higher levelled Pokémon that you catch won't listen to your. To be fair, they do this in SV too.

Scarlet and Violet however... nothing about them adds up to me except the story (and, like I said, I don't care much about the story). It's open world just because. There's no level scaling or real incentive to go beyond the suggested path. There's a ton of exploration, but the graphics are ugly and there isn't much to do at the end of the day.

The Tera gimmick is cool in theory, but looks stupid and Tera raids don't work well in practice. I ended up avoiding a lot of them because I couldn't make sense of the battles.

Character design is important in games. SV's uniforms are wicked ugly. And people justify the uniforms by saying you're in school the whole time. You're technically at work the whole time in PLA, but have FAR more outfit choices, and this was in the past. I hated that my character didn't look like me. If they insisted on uniforms, it should have been on required in school grounds only. Or at least make them look decent!

Then they have shops where you can get accessories, but it's a different shop for every accessory. Imagine irl having to go to a different store for shoes, socks, tights, hats etc. And not even shoes and socks in the same store. Different stores. This is stupid! And the accessories almost always clash with the uniforms. It's almost impossible to make your character look cool.

(I know there are more options in the DLC, but we shouldn't have to pay real money for more clothes).

The school theme also doesn't really mesh well with the open world theme, imo. Open world should have been more about choosing your own adventure.

Which SV tried to do, but failed (imo). Obviously no level scaling (seriously, this would have bumped the game up in my personal ranking a lot. And it kills me, because level scaling is in fact a thing in the Pokémon universe!), but you also have to make the challenges interesting.

The gyms bored me. Puzzles were dumb. My favorite was looking for freaking Sunflora, one of my least favorite Grass-types. But it was sort of cute having them follow me. The Star raids felt the same each time, so I got bored of those quickly too. And I didn't care much about Team Star.

I will say I liked the Path of Legends. Arven's story was really good and I played Scarlet, so I liked the paradox mons a lot more. This was legitimately the only reason I kept playing. This path was like a 9/10 for me, while the others were like a 3 or 4.

I also liked the Penny fight because I like Eeveelutions. Going to mass outbreaks was also fun. And that's pretty much all I liked about SV.

This turned into a rant about SV. Conclusion: imo, it was not cohesive. I want the gen 10 to be cohesive. I know we aren't going to get the Battle Frontier, a second region to explore, or all the Pokémon, and mandatory EXP Share is here to stay. I've accepted that. I just want some choices again, and some love and care put into the region itself.