Version .335A
I'm editing my review to keep up with the latest update. There has been a lot of content added since the last time I played. The new fakemons look great and feel great to play, each functioning differently from the others. The Viruark focuses on statuses, the Gardevoir on putting the enemies to sleep, and the Tsareena focuses on buffing up your ATK while stalling the opponent with its huge defense stats. The last fakemon is harder to use as IMO the game doesn't yet have many pokemons and fights where playing the long game is a viable strategy ; actually, just hitting hard and fast is often times the easiest way to deal with this game's difficulty, except with the 3rd Gym badge, which personnaly was annoying as I hate stall fights in any RPG, but after a few tries and using Tasreena it was doable I guess.
Speaking of difficulty, I really have to adress the thing no one seems to have noticed, and that is the difficulty is all over the place. People have complained many times about the game's difficulty, and so the devs have tried to adress that without completely removing what the game was going for. The result is that the game gives you quite a few fakemons that are way over the top in terms of raw power and movesets, and tries to compensate that by giving you very few money and items, and ramping up the bosses quite a lot compared to the trainers you find in the rest of the levels. I'm not gonna complain about the fakemons, as they feel really great to play (and look at), but it all just seems like a quickly ducktaped justification for the harsh boss fights, rather than a conscious game design decision following a well-defined difficulty curve leading up to that moment. Every trainer battle is hard, every boss fight is impossible if you don't go the extra mile and learn about strategies online.
Again, personally I don't mind that, and I did manage to get through the difficulty (I've survived Pokemon Reborn, I can go through anything), but it only feels rewarding so long as the difficulty curve leads you to that moment. In one moment the game is very punishing if you're not prepared beforehand, and in the next moment the game suddenly decides to give you two new overpowered fakemons, a Volcanion that is very easy to find and capture, 3 Expert belts and a Leftovers. Like... Thanks ? But I wouldn't have needed all that so soon into the game if the difficulty was more evenly spread out throughout the story.
This results in a wierd overall pacing as well, and is the main reason I lowered my score from 5 to 3. The first half of the game is a slow, painful grind just to get by that one kid by the bridge who plays a competitive stall game. Then the game gets to a comfortable pace up until Eclipse City where the game goes back to sending you brick walls in the face you can't get by without grinding. To accomodate this the devs have added an Audino trainer for fast leveling up, but the result is that my pokemons suddenly became way too overpowered for a while (as I was scared to get stomped out again) and made the boss fight in the woods a joke, until the game suddenly decided to increase the levels of all pokemons from ~20 to ~40-45 in the wild, and 50+ for the trainers, while I was still early 40s.
And I think the problem is that, the dev wants a hard experience (fair enough), but also knows this is a porn game and most players here are not the most competitive out there, which lead them to give them easy outs for some fights but not all of them, resulting in a mediocre experience for everyone.
Also, just the speed of the game in general is really slow, and the frequent lags from the levels loading can take 20 to 30 seconds sometimes. I don't why the devs don't simple give us the Bike, as it was only used in the original games to gatekeep the player from certain paths and allowing him to backtrack more easily. Here that's not an issue, so why not giving it to us?
So overall, I still think this is a good game the devs are invested in, but I think they keep in mind what they want for the game and stick to that, in order to avoid false advertisments which could lure unaware players into leaving bad reviews. If you want to make a hard game, fine, go with it, but don't forget to polish the difficulty curve to allow as many people as possible to enjoy it. It doesn't have to be hard and grindy from the start, leave that to the later levels once your players know what experience you've intended for them.