The battles have a lot to them, but overall the world and new pokemon feel poor and like a second thought.
Story:
This is the lowest point of the game. I will flat out say it, this story sucks. The legendary pokemon that were once just mythical birds or clones of ancient pokemon are now considered freakin' gods! There are temples in their honor and everyone talks about how these god pokemon created everything. NO! That is not what a pokemon is supposed to be! I found mewtwo's story cool, he was a clone of an ancient pokemon who destroyed his lab and ran away as a powerful psychic. But no, now they're gods who created the universe, I should not even be able to catch that in a pokeball!
A paragraph and I haven't even talked about the story. Team Galactic is out and off their rocker talking crazy cultist talk, causing trouble where ever they go. While they're supposed to sound crazy, they're the most normal NPCs in this world. Every NPC you find is a walking sign in that they will only talk about stuff that makes no sense or will be a blatantly obvious hint as to what you're supposed to do. Due to this, every town and everything in this world will feel stupid. I liked the layout of the world, but the people in it just don't make me believe it at all, which is kinda important for an RPG.
Graphics:
I get a headache just trying to think if what I just saw was really good or really bad. It's a 2d grid movement classic RPG, but it's 3d in a way. Sprites look really simple and pretty dated, this is no Mother 3, but the 3d looks nice blended with the 2d. I especially love the depth you get on climbing up a mountain. Makes the game feel a bit better despite it's old designs on the RPG world. It's also nice that they brought back night and day, now causing buildings to light up and backgrounds in battle to change. There's a good deal of little touches, but the overall look of the world looks like it needs an update, at least on character art.
Gameplay:
If you like pokemon before hand, you'll love this. If you didn't, then yeah. At a glance, it looks like the same pokemon, and it basically is, but there's a lot and I mean a lot of hidden depth. I can't even begin to list the small changes to the game that make it feel so much better. My 10 or so battles with people have actually been entertaining, where as back then I got bored and watched people just mewtwo spam. Online also works really well. Voice adds a lot to the online and I finally got to settle some scores of people. There's also a lot of secrets to find, and about a dozen legendaries, even if I do hate them, as well as
I do have 2 big problems though. My first is that while there's well over 400 pokemon, they lock all but 150 of them from normal capture, and from any capture until you pretty much beat the elite 4. This makes having 400 pokemon in the first place really redundant and ruins the already extremely poor singleplayer portion of the game. My second problem is that lots and lots of new pokemon are just flat out poor design. Some get no uniqueness to them, and a lot are just replacements of common pokemon, seeing as the developers want to limit what pokemon you can find from the start to 150.
Smaller complaints include too much slow text in combat and not enough use of the returning night and day system.
Sound:
I can't complain about the music in the world. There's a good mix of new tracks that are very nice and suiting of the world. It really drags me into the environment until I realize again the citizens are all walking signs and don't know how to raise pokemon at all. The sound effects during attacks are also nice, and new pokemon battle cries sound nice, though they need to update the old pokemon battle cries as they sound completely out of place.
My main complaint is that in battles, there's no variety. There's your 1 time battles like gym leaders that have their own music, elite 4 music, ect. But all wild pokemon, your most common encounter, have music that just got annoying to me. Trainer battle music also got on my nerves after a while. Overall though, good music.
Who wants this game?
Fans of pokemon who want a newer, better, and online battle system. I want to keep loving pokemon, and I still love the old ones, but gamefreak seems to have forgotten they were making an RPG, and focused almost purely on the battle system. It works as the first online pokemon, but fails as an RPG.