…well, here goes nothing.

As I have previously intimated, I’m not going to write a narrative playthrough journal of Shield, as I did for White 2, X and Moon, because while those are extremely fun and I genuinely like a lot of my writing for them (particularly in the Moon one, where I got carried away and fabricated an entire romance subplot with a random Team Skull grunt), they take a lot of time, and I think there are other aspects of this game that should be higher priority. But I can hardly leave my loyal readers without the benefit of my piercing insights into every aspect of this game’s features and story as they develop over the course of my playthrough, so instead we’re gonna have a more bullet-point-style approach, like I did when I played Alpha Sapphire. It goes without saying, of course, that here be spoilers, although I might do a short spoiler-free review thingy of the whole game at the end for anyone who still isn’t sure whether this game is for them, if that’s of interest to anyone (Sword and Shield are so polarising that it feels like 98% of the Pokémon community is already divided into “most perfect games ever!!!” or “betrayal of the series, the fans and basic human decency” so maybe there’s no point in that, but… well, it’s a possibility). If you already don’t intend to play this game and don’t care about spoilers, or if you’re already ahead of me, then read on – here we go!