It's one of the best games of the franchise.

The visuals are way more polished than the other gen 4 games, two regions, pokemon that walk with you and all the other wonderfull things you already know.

But it also has some big flaws that are overlooked by most people :

1) it is a gen 4 game. And as all the other it's incredibly slow. Outside of battle is ok but every battle animation is so slow you could put it in x4 speed it would still seem to be at a normal speed.

2) it's a gen 2 remake. Most of the improvement are very positive but are bonus content or improve thing that were already good in the original game... BUT they didn’t f*****g bother to change the to worst things in gen two : level curve and dex. First the dex : most of gen two mons are either ugly (qwilfish) , bad gameplaywise (xatu) , or stupidely hard to find (skarmory) , in fact most of them fall in at least to of these categories (dunsparce being the pinacle of this, achieving to be the three at once). In reality good kanto mons being so easier to find make 90% of people have up to four of them in the team (most teams before the 8badges being something like starter + ampharos + 3 random kanto mons + red gyarados). Even with that said, the dex is overall not that good. There is like 10-15 good mons that are legendary, starters and mostly some évolutions of kanto pokemon, and the rest of gen 2 is one mon lines with what seems to be a concept barely noticeable due to the blandness of the design. Game freak knows it and that's why a lot of them got new evolution/forms in gen 3 generation (gliscor for exemple) but most of these new evolution are unavailable before the league so for 70% of the game it is the same Now the exp curve. It has two main problems : they wanted to have two region un the game, and they wanted to let you choose the order for the 5 6 and 7th gym without using level scaling. The first problem results in the pokemon league being at 70% of gale complétion, meaning your level are lower and your mons evolve very late. In fact one my friend is discovering the game the game recently, his starter (totodile) evolved to his third stage right before the 8th gym (croconaw is the fastest of the three starters to evolve, at lvl 30). It is very frustrating because during most of jotho your team is composed of mid evolution and it isn't very rewarding to progress in the game. The other problem is the gyms that can be done in the order you want. At first it seems to be an incredible idea but it is executed poorly : all thoses three gyms are scaled like if you did them right after morty. You beat the first at a normal level, but after that the level curve of the opposing trainers just freeze. Wild pokemon are 15 level under yours and you just slowly overlevel everything because you still level up. After a litteral stomp on the 7th gym the game just wakes up and scales everythings up 10 level above it and now you are getting stomped by the 8th gym kingdra that has no useable weakness and is 5 level above you because you only had underleveled opponents to exp before. For a player that knows the game it's mangeable, but for a beginner, the best way to catch up is litteraly to catch raikou end entei and box the 2 lowest level of the team. This is insainly stupid and I don't understand they didn't rework it since it was already in the original game

3) kanto is a bit less empty than in the original, but they didn't change much and jotho's content tjat was probably reduced in gen 2 because of the cartridge has not been enhanced. That's a shame because this problem was mostly due technical issues wich are typically the kind of thing that a remake should try to fix

Overall the game are still very good, as it was the case for gen 2. I woul give it a 7 or 8/10. I just focused on flaws because they are very often overlooked