As you know, there has been a lot of positivity around Pokemon Let’s GO Pikachu/Eevee in the last few days, as those who purchased the game are enjoying it very much.

However, there are also people upset about Pokemon Let’s GO Pikachu/Eevee and are voicing out their disapproval on the Internet. One such place is Metacritic, the world’s biggest review aggregator.

Earlier this week, we reported the final Metascore derived from critic reviews was 81, a respectable score for a new type of core RPG. But the average rating for user reviews on Metacritic is a failing grade – 4.8 out of 10. This is because Pokemon Let’s GO has received 242 negative reviews, 25 mixed reviews, and 195 positive reviews from Metacritic users. It’s very shocking for a Pokemon game to have more negative reviews than positive reviews.

This is the lowest ever user review score for a mainline Pokemon game on Metacritic, and it’s the first ever mainline Pokemon game to have a failing user review score on Metacritic. The full list of user review scores for all mainline Pokemon games on Metacritic can be found below:

Pokemon Let’s GO Pikachu/Eevee: 4.8 (failed)

Pokemon Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon: 9.0

Pokemon Sun/Moon: 8.3

Pokemon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire: 8.6

Pokemon X/Y: 8.6

Pokemon Black 2/White 2: 7.6

Pokemon Black/White: 7.6

Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver: 8.4

Pokemon Platinum: 8.2

Pokemon Diamond: 7.9

Pokemon Emerald: 8.4

Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen: 8.6

Pokemon Ruby: 8.5

Here are some of the negative reviews written by users:

xAziDahaka – 1.0

A sad excuse for a title coming from the world’s biggest franchise, Let’s go mainly focuses on dumbing down considerably an already easy series, an imbecilic and reduntant process. No reason whatsoever to touch the simple battle system that worked since the franchise was born, no need to remove wild encounters and catching to make space for more low effort spoonfeeding mechanics. Nobody really wanted or asked for this game but here we are, going to kanto for the 12nd time experiencing the same exact story over and over again.

Waluigi4Smash – 1.0

m*bile games are ruining the videogame industry
once games were about overcoming a challenge, now they’re instant gratification simulators that basically play themselves
and would you look at that, GO success directly caused an easier, casualized, kanto pandering, low effort cashgrab completely deviod of passion
pokemon is a zombie series

UniversalReview – 4.0

Pokemon Let’s Go is an entertaining, lighthearted Pokemon experience, ripe for newcomers to the series and fans returning to it after many years. Kanto’s graphics have been updated. The presentation and music quality is greater than ever before. The return of following Pokemon brings a certain magic to exploring the overworld and the game is filled is with loving homages to the franchise’s early days, both for casual and more dedicated fans.

So why is my score so low?

Because for all the effort the games put into style, accessibility and a warm feeling of nostalgia, the core experience under the hood feels strikingly shallow – a problem many have had with the series as a whole lately.

The removal of wild battles in favour of a Pokemon Go style system, and the availability of only the original 151 Pokemon + 2 newcomers are the most striking changes, enough to put off many fans by themselves, but ultimately only the tip of the iceberg. The difficulty has been lowered compared to both the original Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow and their remakes Fire-Red and Leaf-Green years prior. The post-game content, the pride of some of the most well renowned Pokemon experiences like Gold/Silver and their even better remakes, Emerald and Black 2/White 2 is particularly barren, with the aforementioned remakes of the same game: FR/LG doing more in this regard in 2004. The wireless features the franchise has had since 2006 have been stripped back: random wireless battles and the Global Trading System are no more. The removal of various layers of battling complexity: held items, abilities and more have also put a major dampener on the competitive side of things, an aspect of the franchise that has only been growing in recent years.

I think the shallow feeling of the games as a whole can be summarised with one analogy to another Pokemon remake many years back. The original Pokemon red and blue were ripe with speculation surrounding the mysterious 151st Pokemon Mew – all playground rumours aside, Mew was unattainable aside from very sparse, inaccessible events. Then came Pokemon Emerald in 2005: in it Gamefreak put the effort into crafting a special event in which you could finally catch Mew with some special in-game story content. Players had been curious for years and were finally rewarded. Now compare that to Mew’s availability in Let’s Go. With the game’s efforts to reignite nostalgia and the magic of the early franchise, it would’ve been all to easy to implement a special Mew event: maybe as a reward for catching all 150 Pokemon, or as a homage to many of the rumors back in the day: the perfect cherry on top of a game. Instead, Mew was locked behind a paywall: an accessory that cost real world money to attain, all for the privelage of obtaining Mew with no extra bells or whistles, story content or magic to speak of.

This is a problem many, myself included, have had with the franchise to various degrees in the past five or so years. Constant alluding to days past instead of moving forward. Cutting out difficulty and depth in favour of adding extra style over substance. An ever shrinking amount of content per game owed to misconceptions about what the children of today want, completely ignoring that the franchise attracted so many newcomers throughout its history with exactly the opposite – and it is many of those fans in particular that feel left behind with Let’s Go.

The games look, sound and play impressively. No doubt by themselves they are a fun, harmless Pokemon experience, and will reignite the magic in many, But in the context of Gamefreak’s current approach when developing the franchise and the milestones set by previous instalments, Let’s Go feels like a hollow “return to form” and foray onto the Nintendo Switch, wowing on the surface but offering little underneath. This is Pokemon far from its best.

AIJolly – 0

This game is the apotheosis of Junichi Masuda’s lazy design ethos. What we expected from the first HD Pokémon game was nothing short of the standard set by Breath of the Wild. Instead we got this lazy cash grab shovelware title.

This game is more notable in what features are removed than those added. Namely, 600 Pokémon have been culled, abilities and held items removed, and all pretense of challenge is gone. Even the battle animations are lazy, and look worse than they did in 20 year old Pokémon Stadium from the N64.

The graphics are inexcusably cheap and ugly, evoking the look of your average mobile game. The return to a blocky isometric overworld and chibi trainer models is jarring in a 2018 Switch game. The same dozen or so assets get copy/pasted ad nauseam. A stroll through Viridian Forest looks much as it did in 1999 on the Gameboy Color, and that’s not a good thing!

Overall, this game is a cheap cash grab that tarnishes the brand and sets low expectations for the 2019 titles. I hope the bad will Gamefreak has sown among its erstwhile biggest fans was worth luring a few suckers into paying for $49.99 Mew DLC. Junichi Masuda and Gamefreak should be ashamed.

PandaJavi – 0

After 17 years uninterruptedly buying every single Pokémon mainline game and lving every “hype season”, excited to see the new features, new designs and new ideas, this is the first time that I’m going to skip it, looking forward to the 2019 games. I can understand Game Freak trying to simplify the things or whatever, but come on, removing over 600 creatures, more than two thirds of the moves, abilities, held items and making it one of the games with less post game content since GB era, lacking features than a 2004 GBA release had like Sevii Islands, using the same engine from ORAS, not reaching even S/M level and going back to the grid system, when the game has been on developement for years… that’s not casualization, that’s pure laziness, and as a lifelong fan, I’m sad to see the direction Pokémon is talking and I hope next year’s games to have a serious graphic update and a lot of content, because I guess these pair of games have been very dissapointing for many of us.

As you can tell, many users are upset that Game Freak has removed many core features from Pokemon Let’s GO Pikachu/Eevee, the availability of only 153 Pokemon, and “terrible graphics” for the first ever HD Pokemon game.

What do you think of their reviews? Let us know in the comments below.