Though I wasn't expecting the Sword and Shield Expansion Passes to fix the main issues I had with Sword and Shield, it has become clear in hindsight they've chosen to double down problems that feel like they've been plaguing Pokemon since Generation 6. While Isle of Armor was ok for what it was, it didn't make me excited for the second half of the Expansion Pass, the Crown Tundra.
To get one of the small things out of the way first, the addition of multi-battles to the Pokemon League... is exactly what it sounds like. It's fine for what it is, and the character moments are nice, but it's nothing spectacular. The character moments are nice, and a minor nitpick I have is that it would have been nice to have the version exclusive trainers not found in your version of the game be available in these battles, but that's just a minor nitpick. I'm not going to be loosing sleep just because, to my knowledge, I can't team up with Alister in Sword to face Klara and Avery.
As for the Crown Tundra itself? Well first I have to ask this. "How does this region's climate work?!" I'm not talking about the insanity that is the Wild Area's weather patterns, I'm talking about the overall climate of the region. While it was a problem in the base game, the snow areas being the biggest offenders here, but the Crown Tundra amplifies this by being attached to the bottom of the region, unlike the Isle of Armor, which was it's own island. Snowy mountains to the north and south, both of which have visible cutoff points where the weather turns quite nice and reasonably warm, and a desert in the middle of the region? Climate has been a pretty common issue when it comes to Pokemon games, Kalos suffered from a similar problem where it felt like all of the region's cold was concentrated in a very small chunk of land. Sinnoh, well at least in Platinum, did it the overall best as even if it wasn't snowing everywhere, it still felt cold for most of the region (I say most because the post game area derails that to a extent). I don't get that consistent feel from Galar, and while I was willing to shake it off in the base game, the Crown Tundra makes the problem worse thanks to it's position on the map, and it being directly attached to the region. Is this meant as a nod to climate change, as it's what the awful story of the base game is about? It didn't work if it is.
Regarding the content of the expansion, the name of the game is Legendary Hunting. You have the Dynamax Adventure, which is a remixed version of the Max Raid Battle Dens where you have to beat three Dynamax Pokemon and a forth Legendary Pokemon (also Dynamaxed) with 4 Pokemon picked from a pool of randomly selected Pokemon, or Pokemon you catch in the adventure. You can't heal between battles unless you find some berries, and if your party gets knocked out 4 times between all the battles, you loose and have to restart. Structurally, one of the best ways I can describe it is "What if the Raid Battles behaved like the Battle Factory and Battle Pike's awkward adopted child from Pokemon Go". It's fine, though like the raid battles, I question how sustainable it will be when enough people stop playing the game. I haven't played the mode with NPC's, but from my experiences with the normal Raid Dens and NPC trainers, I'm not expecting anything tolerable. If you want to do more grinding for the sake of Competitive, you'll be spending a lot of time here.
When not doing raids, you're hunting the new Galarian forms of the Legendary birds by searching the Wild Area, Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra... or to be more accurate to my experiences, you're searching the Crown Tundra, and trying to intercept Zapdos and Moltres in the Wild Area and Isle of Armor respectively. There's also the six Regi Pokemon, yes, six. Two new Regi Pokemon can be found in the Crown Tundra, Regieleki and Regidraco. I was not a fan of getting both of them as they're locked behind getting the original three Regi golems in your save file of Crown Tundra, and you can only get one of the two (granted, of your choice). As someone who has three from their 2005 save file of Emerald, this was tedious as I don't need three versions of Regice, Regirock and Registeel. The story events with Calyrex are interesting enough, if basic. It's a series of easy side-quests resulting in catching both Calyrex, and a Pokemon you can choose, but again it's limited to just the one for that save file, so either trade with a friend, or buy the pass for the other version.
Visually, the Crown Tundra is more impressive then the Isle of Armor and the base game's Wild Area, there's a easy appeal to standing high on mountains and looking down at the scenery after all. But I'm still not sold on fully committing to Open World design for Pokemon games. Neither map felt very explorable to me, though I will admit a large part of that was the fact that I didn't need any of the returning Pokemon, so the maps felt more like a maze to get from point A to point B. Do I think these are worth the asking price now that both are out? I'm still torn mostly because it depends on what you're after out of Pokemon. They're both fine, solid, 6/10 experiences. But they don't excite me, in fact, parts of them make me cautious for the future as items added in the expansions, and the cost of them feel like they could easily be turned into Micro-transactions later down the line. Try telling me it wouldn't be easy, tempting even, to turn stuff like the Bottle Caps and Ability Capsule into Micro-transactions for the sake of watering down competitive even more. It's not like they're against pay-walling old features like the GTS after all.
Game Freak really dropped the ball when it comes to these games. While I don't put all of the blame on them, as a large part of the problem is the multimedia machine that is Pokemon, I don't think you'll find many die hard defenders of this game. I was willing to cut them some slack for X and Y, and if this was the first Switch Pokemon game, I probably would have also been a bit more forgiving. But there is a limit to what I'm willing to let slide. The Pokemon Sword and Shield Expansion Passes, while they may improve the Pokedex problem, don't even attempt to fix other baked in issues the core game has, to the point where I wonder if it was worth putting the effort into the passes at all, and instead diverting those resources into a third version, or letting the games die quickly to make the next ones better. I think the only thing saving Sword and Shield from being called the worst Pokemon games I've ever played is that they're more stable then Generation 1. Congratulations Sword and Shield, you're only slightly better then a pair of games that are almost 25 years old. I hope you're happy with that freebie of an achievement. I hope they've learned their lessons from this game. I hope Generation 9 is better then this. Just because these games sold well doesn't mean that they haven't done damage to the brand. I think the only reason this review is being done so soon after launch was because they got lucky and was bored hours after the content was being released, because I was not excited to play this.
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