I was excited when I read ‘open world’, and for a second I had hope this would be the Pokémon game everyone has been waiting for, where you can travel wherever you want after leaving your home town, can visit all towns and cities and complete the gyms in whatever order you desire, with wild Pokémon visibly roaming the world. But apparently, other than free roaming Pokémon, this game will have none of this. If there’s only one village, then the world will probably just be one giant empty space without much to do in it. No gyms, no cities, no Pokémon League…what exactly is the point of this game?
If all they wanted was a large area filled with wild Pokémon then they should’ve just made Pokémon Snap open world instead, where you’d have to sneak up on wild Pokémon and try to get good pictures of them. That could be pretty cool actually, now that I think about it.
But the worst thing about this is that this will probably give Gamefreak an excuse to not make any of the mainline games open world, and leave the concept to low-effort side games like this.