It breaks so many conventions of Pokémon that I can't even count them. I get how its meant to be adapted for the real world, but there's so much it could have done properly but it refuses to.
Why did they not implement the traditional battle system, but require more activity from the user? You should still be able to throw the poké ball, but why not ALSO allow wild encounters to be used to train Pokémon? They implemented the type system, and moves but that's only used in gym battles and even that's debatable. It feels like a scheme to get Niatic and Pokémon more money, but Nintendo's trying to step back from it, by not promoting it at all. You could replace the game with another franchise (digimon, yugioh, yokai watch) but it wouldn't get downloaded because the franchise is the redeeming factor. It's quite clear that I like Pokémon (in case the avatar wasn't obvious) but this is so far from Pokémon.
Compare it to Mystery Dungeon: A top down dungeon crawler. What does it have to do with Pokémon? The typical mechanics are the same: Items, status effects, abilities, types, moves etc. It's a Pokémon game from another perspective. Hell, you still have to manage your PP. Now go ask a person who exclusively plays PKMN GO what PP means. If they know what it is, they've played Pokémon before. If they don't (and presumably laugh because let's face it, PP is a terrible term), that's because Pokémon GO has no PP. Most players won't even know that Burn cuts attack by a fraction.
Pokémon GO makes the anime look accurate to the games, and that is the biggest insult considering the sheer amount of errors made in the anime.
Nope, need to rant more
When you say "team" and it's Pokémon related, you'd think of teams like Rocket, Magma, Aqua, Plasma... Y'know... the bad guys? Team Rocket gives a mute kid literally thousands of dollars as a bribe to join and fails. Pokémon GO says "hey what team" and they go to work for nothing. Plus this:
When I saw this, I thought 2 things. 1. WTF. 2, where have I heard a story like this before?
Yep, literally as bad as the actual antagonists.
It's also going to impact the main series games due to it's success.
This is the battle frontier from Pokémon Emerald. 5 facilities for expert battlers.
In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl it was reduced to just one, but it was brought back in HeartGold, SoulSilver and Platinum with 4 new reworked facilities. So what is it now?
This tiny house is all that remains of it. The devs said it was because "in the age of emerging mobile phone games, attention spans are shorter" and Pokémon GO's success has sealed the fate of all battle facilities.
