As someone who's been playing Pokemon both casually and competitively on and off for almost two decades now, I wanted to drop in and give my general thoughts about the game.
Mild spoilers ahead for those who care.
It's fantastic, to put it bluntly. Mainline Pokemon games have been deprived of originality for well over a decade at this point. Bland storylines, mediocre characters, and overly simplistic gameplay that would rather hold your hand and let you brute force everything than risk being a slight challenge. The fact that this game is 18+ allows it to delve into much more mature themes and storylines, even ignoring all the H stuff. Even then, the characters as shown so far are incredibly enjoyable, and I'm very much awaiting the next update for more. Cynthia especially, with her teased backstory, has me very excited to see what will transpire down the line.
The difficulty and balancing are top-notch. It doesn't stomp on the player's balls with difficulty like some rom hacks, nor does it just let you breeze through the game with like three pokemon. I had a bit of difficulty in some of the big story battles, but it never felt like "bad" difficulty. The tools needed to win are handed to the player on a silver platter, they just need to use them. Possessing opponent pokemon for better IVs and movesets, the Professor's Aide Challenges for cash and competitive items, raid dens for more items, cash, and unique pokemon to use. Not to mention the extremely wide variety of wild encounters at your disposal. The addition of innate and remnant abilites creates a great level of depth to teambuilding, and allows some otherwise mediocre pokemon to become something really useful (see: Minior, Arbok, Masquerain, and Sandslash). Everything in the game sets you up for success as long as you are willing to spend the time and get invested enough to use it all. Though, even then, you don't *need* to use everything to succeed. With the right strategy and battle execution, you can get through the toughest fights in the game (Courtney, Roxanne, Deoxys, and Froslass) with mediocre or unconventional team members.
The scenes themselves are wonderfully animated. The pixel art looks phenomenal, and the pokemon used for the scenes all have great and distinct personalities. It's also really nice that it's optional content. If you want to play this like a regular pokemon game, then you absolutely can. Not much more to say here, it's just true gem.
The only thing I can really hope for with the next few upcoming updates is that the starter Gastly/Abra finally get to evolve. I believe I remember reading that in a previous post that those two would evolve in a story based event, which hopefully is soon. Because especially in the current "endgame" content, they are struggling badly. And I have grown too emotionally invested in them to bench them for long periods of time.
Ending thoughts: Good ass game. Great mixture of balancing and difficulty. Great quality of life additions. This game is pure gem. idite, you are awesome and swag and I hope your pillow is always cool when you go to bed <3