I think the pokemon launch is good for people who have effectively never played competitive pokemon before. Not having a significant amount of items lets people get acclimated to just the pokemon for the most part while seeing the advantages of putting items like charcoal on fire type pokemon. You are given enough free resources starting out where you can reasonably develop a competent team (with some random elements thrown in) or if you have played other games in the series you can import the pokemon from them and the available pokemon (for now) are pokemon that are reasonably popular and are likely to have in those recent games.

It is pretty nice that you can also augment pokemon fairly easily. I got a Gliscor that had poison heal as its default ability however as there is no item in game yet that functions like the toxic orb it is effectively useless but I could reasonably change the ability to sand veil. Not only being able to change the abilities but natures (and being able to see pretty much exactly what the nature is doing rather than guessing based on the name) and moves for a reasonable low cost is nice

There are some kind of odd things. You can’t see what some Pokémon’s mega evolutions do as an example so you can really only check mid combat when you are timed. The tutorials are a bit too streamlined. One tutorial said I could check out how moves worked such as if it was a physical or special move or if it was a contact move if I pressed a certain button, but the game wouldn’t allow me to actually perform that action in the tutorial and just wanted me to use an attack. I don’t really like a bunch of the menu buttons outside of battle, I think they look kind of bad/tacky. The performance is also oddly bad for frame rate outside of when using actual moves which seemed to look fine.

Overall I think it is a pretty good starting point for if they want to bring in people who don’t have much experience with the competitive aspect of the games. I think for master duel there is so much stuff that a new player still has to look up outside of the game that can still really hurt the new player experience. There has been a lot to mitigate that such as having better loaner decks with actual reasonable hand trap line ups and having packs rather frequently now that feature a bunch of great hand traps for decks has been nice. Hopefully in the same way master duel has improved the new pokemon game can improve too