While SM made some nice changes to some things, in many places, it's taken steps backwards as well. Some people might not even notice/care about these things, but I have a small playgroup of semi competitive players who all do a lot of breeding/battling, so this is from our perspective, not from a casual player:
-Early game handholding.
Sun and Moon's first hour, and ESPECIALLY their first half hour is by far the slowest starts any pokemon game has ever had. It takes roughly half an hour to even get your first pokemon and even after that, the tutorial doesn't really end until partway into the second island. Which, can be as far as 2 hours in from what I've seen. I understand Game freak was trying hard to make this one more story driven this time around, but I found myself frustrated by the high quantity of dialogue and simply mashing to get through it instead of reading after the fist little while. I wanted to GO. I wanted to EXPLORE. But I wasn't allowed to because the game wasn't done telling me about how I need to keep my hands and feet inside the ride at all times. I know it's a kids game, but I don't think we give kids enough credit sometimes when it comes to coming to an understanding of a game. sure, some kids are retarded, but this was ridiculous.
-The loss of super training.
Thiss sucks for reasons that Gamefreak may not have originally intended. The primary use for Super training was reset bags to set EVs back to zero, as well as a means of checking on how many eggs have hatched without opening a menu, which allowed you to maximize your O-power time since you were constantly moving. It was also the easiest way to get evolution stones, albeit a sometimes RNG based one. The new way is time based in Poke Pelago so you're more or less stuck waiting multiple hours, hoping that they give you the stone you want before trying again. Super training took maybe a minute every cycle, so it was very easy to super train for a stone for 5-10 minutes and move on.
-Pressing X no longer exits you out of all menus.
A useful thing that I noticed very early on was gone. You're now stuck mashing B and it takes much, much longer depending on how far into the menus you were. Some people like that X and Y buttons have more use in the menus, but being able to rapidly close menus was a small, but greatly enjoyed feature we used.
-Online features have been moved to festival plaza.
GTS, BattleSpot, Wondertrade and other online features are pretty decently out of the way to get to. Before, it was just a matter of pressing one button on the bottom screen and you were there. Now you have to stop everything you were doing and load into a new area entirely, and load again whenever you were done.
-EV training is less consistent.
Even with the inclusion of bottlecaps, which are pretty rare in the grand scheme of things. Horde training was super fast, and took maybe 3 minutes to fully EV train a pokemon once you knew what to do. Now, you have to SOS chain in order to reach the same result. It's slower,and less consistent since SOS isn't a guaranteed trigger every turn. The pelago island for this is also super slow, though I will give points to it since I can essentially set it up before bed and wake up to at least 1 stat maxed out. And if you go the bottlecap way, you're just grinding for bottlecaps instead of grinding for eggs. I still enhoy their inclusion since it means you can clean up the stats of your Hidden Power/Shiny/Hidden ability pokemon so you're not making a choice between optimization and aesthetics/utility. I personally, avoided Hidden Power just because of how much of a pain it was to get, and it often forced to you have less than optimal IVs.
-Egg hatching is just generally inferior to XY/ORAS.
Infinite loops was arguably one of the best additions to gen 6. You were able to hold left or right and just let the eggs deal with themselves, as long as you kept the screen in your peripherals to mash through the hatching animations whenever they happened. The Tauros method in SM requires constant input from the player; if you stop spinning your analog stick in the enclosed area, the tauros stops moving entirely. I will give to them that the breeder being in constant view is nice, since you always know exactly when it is time to pick your egg up, but you also have to get off your tauros entirely to leave the enclosed area, further slowing the process down.
-Clothing variety options are arguably fewer than previous games.
At first I was excited when clothing was being brought back. Player customization was probably my favorite part of XY and I was sad that they took it away from ORAS. The problem I had with it was I felt that male characters got shafted vs female characters at the time in terms of variety, and hoped they added more features to balance it out a bit. Male characters more or less have 4 different types of shirts; Muscleshirts, T-Shirts, polos, and button down t-shirts in this game. So all short sleeved. Vs XYs 5, but it also had a much wide variety. Winter coats, fall jackets, t-shirts, open dress shirt T-shirts combos, etc. Male characters get 3-4 different sets of legwear in this game; Shorts, Capris, Cargo shorts, and cutoff jeans that end at the shins. So shorts, shorts, shorts, and ALMOST pants. Vs shorts and pants of various styles. 2 types of hats; Baseball caps and trilbys, vs XY's 6. SM gets plus points since they added more haircuts and dye colors for males, I'll give them that. But other than from the perspective of "You don't need all those clothing types when you're in Hawaii (Which really shouldn't matter for some things, I spent a lot of time in the Arizona desert and I wore hoodies and jeans during the dry season constantly)" There's really no reason to have gotten rid of those.
-Little to no changes to postgame content compared to previous generations.
There was one short sidequest you can do related to the main plot after beating the game, and one other relation to Eeveelutions. the first one takes about half an hour to an hour to do depending on your luck, whereas the second takes just a little longer than that. Afterwards, what do you have? The Battle Tree, which is simply the Maison again in disguise.
-Loss of Friend Safari.
Friend Safari was a very social part of XY. I remember meeting up with people holding 3DS and we would all get excited becuase we had no idea what each person had. I remember joining online communities to trade friend safari codes just generally having fun with it. That's not here, and the plaza is a very non-interactive substitute.
-Rotom/Town map/Exploration
I have beaten SM TWICE now and I still could not tell you how the bottom screen worked. Sometimes I want to view the map and Rotom talks to me. Sometimes i want to view the map and rotom won't STOP talking to me. The town map itself is also difficult to read in terms of what's traversable and what's not. I felt very on rails this time. There were so many (literal) fences keeping me out of places that really didn't have that much of a level difference, or a story difference. Just as n example, the desert is locked out until you beat the ghost captain's trial, but you have no reason to go to that part of the island once you've actually done it. In fact, not only did the plot lead you in the opposite direction of that area, you never really go back. I only ever did because i was on legendary cleanup after beating the game and noticed I still had undiscovered locations.
-Tilted difficulty curve.
Difficulty is great, if not spot on in some places in this game, and incredibly off in others. Keeping the EXP share on for the entire game will have you roflstomping by being 15-20 levels above curve for 90% of the game, but you'll fall in line with the end of the game with a level 55-60ish party at the end. OR you can keep it off and have it be about perfect for most of the game, then suddenly you'll get a 10-15 level jump from one area to the next and suddenly you're at an incredible disadvantage. Like I said, I played through this game twice, each time having the EXp share on or off.
-Non-threatening NPCs
Most NPCs in this game have 1-3 pokemon maxmimum. In fact, even in your final rival battle at the end of the game, your rival only has a measly 4. Very rarely did I ever feel like I was in any danger because I just simply had a greater total sum of health than my opponent. Sure, i still had to take type advantages into consideration to not be going to a pokemon center after every other fight, but it wasn't until maybe the final few fights where I actually felt like I HAD to pay attention to succeed.
TL;DR: SM has taken multiple steps forward in some places, and just as many back in others. Overall, I still enjoyed the game, but was disappointed in so many removed features it leads me to question why this is the big-hyped-20th-anniversary game I was looking forward to.
