Popping just to say, I think the thing a lot of people are missing is that a lot of people who are upset of the exp.share are people who never felt the need to grind to begin with. I challenged the Alola Elite Four with a severly underleved team and had a blast doing it to. Playing with the exp.share off rewards you more for utilizing things like status moves and paying attention to individual stats.
It's possible for Sw/Sh to balance around the exp.share, but after Let's Go having a mandatory exp.share and being hilariously easy as well, a lot of us just don't have faith in that. It's nice to have the exp.share as an option but I'm not excited about having it forced on me.
I'm honestly more upset with that decision then I am with the National Dex. With the Dex, I can kind of see why they made the cuts, even if I don't fully agree it was the best choice they could have made. But with the exp.share, I can't see any reason they'd make it mandatory other then them assuming that every pokemon fan is a little kid or a casual player.
I feel like some of the executives at GF have fallen into the traps of thinking that the franchise is just for kids (which obviously isn't true), and also thinking that kids are always impatient and dumb (which can be true, but not always). As a 22-year-old ex competitive player who spent hours in the Battle Frontier as a kid, it feel really alienating.
I'm still excited for Sw/Sh. I love the look of the Galar region, and I think a lot of the Pokemon and character designs are still packing a ton of charm. I still think they'll be fun, and I'm still willing to try to find what challenge I can in them. But even I won't deny that GF has taken some big missteps in recent years. While I'll still defend the parts of the games I actually like (such as the graphics), I do hope that all this controversy around Sw/Sh ends up being the wake up call GF needs.
