Enjoying modern, Switch-era Pokémon games as someone familiar with the good old days is often a question of how much you’re happy to let slide. With Sword and Shield it was the eerie Potemkin Villages, the whiff of cut content, the sudden and, I still maintain, very bad decision to do away with dungeons entirely that you had to let go. But in exchange you got one of the series’ biggest gambles, an actually-kind-of-great first stab at open world zones in the Wild Areas.
