Greg Lobanov

on the third island now and so far the entire game has felt very linear path with cutscene tutorials every few minutes

note i've only played pokemon blue+silver, and now moon, so perhaps there was one that felt like this before and i just missed it

like imagine one where get dropped into the world and then explore at your own pace, decide to head to the area you hear has fire types, etc

I really don't think this would be very good, but I don't think "open world" by definition is good

i don't necessarily mean open world, but pokemon doesn't feel like it wants to let me even explore or take anything in on my own

Pokemon's freedom has always been more in exploring to find Pokemon, not so much exploring the world itself though

sure but i feel it could let me do that w/o hand-holding me the entire way and make my adventure feel like walking down a road

I agree, but again I didn't get that feeling at all with SuMo. The only tutorial bits were maybe an hour at the start?