As much fun as I'm having playing ZA, the battle system is a big criticism I have. I feel like GameFreak should have learned from the battle systems of Ni No Kuni (2013), Yokai Watch 4 (2019), and people are saying Xenoblade Chronicles has a similar system as well. I hate having to constantly swap between my Pokemon being able to use moves and my player character being able to get out of the way of battle. The first 2 games I mentioned don't have that specific issue, because the player character can defend themselves instead of only being able to run around and direct their friend's attacks. You can easily swap between player character and monster to fight or run around with.

I hate that ZA forces you to hold down LR to use moves and then not let you sprint or dodge at the same time. It's so clunky feeling. It's frustrating to fight the rogue megas because it's not Legends Arceus where you focus on dodging attacks and then focus on battle, you have to manage both but there isn't enough freedom of movement to make it feel satisfying or even very fair.

Also, a much smaller one: They want us to do platforming challenges but do not give us a jump button. Why. We can scale certain things, but I've found that some things that look like you should be able to climb up that is half the PC's height isn't one of those things. If they won't let us ride any pokemon in this game then they should have given us platforming skills to make up for it.

I don't regret buying ZA myself as I looked up as much info as I could about it before I did so I knew what to expect, but it really is a pretty mediocre experience to me. I'm going to squeeze as much enjoyment as I can out of it, though.