"So I’m finally playing Ultra Sun for the first time, and it feels so much more full featured than Sword/Shield..."

So I’m finally playing through Pokémon Ultra Sun (I was pretty fatigued with the linearity of Pokémon Sun when it came out, and though I started Ultra Sun shortly after release, I couldn’t bring myself to actually play through Alola again so soon back then). And I’m finding this to be a very interesting experience.Now before I say anything else, I do want to make it clear, I actually really like Pokémon Sword. I found them to be ridiculously fun, and they were definitely among my more liked installments in the series in at least a few years. I felt the hate they got was a bit overblown.With that said, I may be misremembering Sword (given it’s been more than a year since I last seen before the played it), but in a lot of ways Ultra Sun feels like it's a lot deeper and has a lot more content than that. Like it has a lot of little mechanics and things that to my memory have no equivalent in Sword. It feels a lot more... full featured?So just off the top of my head, Pokemon Refresh, or the photography game, or the quests, or the wild Pokémon calling for help, and the actual integration of the Pokémon into the world and their ecosystem feels far better and more organic than any other game in the series (which is a bit surprising, actually). There's also few of the minigames in Sword that are in this (and this is already a step back in terms of minigames from Gens 3-6). It’s got more options (stupid and obvious thing, but I can turn off EXP Share). Battles and dungeons are actually difficult. There just seems to be a lot more going on here that I don’t remember in Sword. There’s just so much more going on here, compared to Pokémon Sword. If I was unfamiliar with the series, and I had been told that Sword is the handheld game and Ultra Sun the console one, I’d actually have believed it (obviously I don’t mean this graphically, I mean this in terms of ambition and content).I do realize this is a bit of an unfair comparison, as Ultra Sun benefits not just from building upon Su/Mo, but also two other pairs of games that came on 3DS before it, while Sword is technically the first mainline game on a new system (and those are typically far rougher games than the ones that follow). Also, I haven’t played the expansions which I’m given to believe are actually significant additions to the base Sword/Shield, so there is also that.But I just found this interesting. I’m speaking as someone who wasn’t too big on the Alola games, and who actually liked the Galar games more than most people seem to have, but returning to Ultra Sun has definitely been interesting and eye opening.I still think I had more fun with Sword, but at least I now understand that there’s a very severe curtailing of ambition with that game relative to the 3DS ones (which I already feel we’re significant steps back relative to the DS ones). I sincerely hope that Game Freak manages to get some more full featured games reminiscent of what the series used to be like out with the best Switch entires. Right now I’m a bit afraid of seeing what they’re going to do to Sinnoh (my favorite region) in the inevitable remakes... via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/3tdDV3Z