Sunlight ☀️

UNITE is fun to play but truthfully I'm glad it's going. There are no less than 5 events happening at any time, gachas everywhere, multiple passes (BP, membership, events) going at once, and outfits for trainers and Pokémon that could end up costing nearly $80-$100 USD each. The monetization model for this game was extremely predatory. It preys on FOMO and offers no way to receive items after the event period is over. The only way to get past BP items is through a rotating gacha, which can cost you hundreds of dollars, and only offers a small handful of items every rotation out of the thousands that the game has. The Pokémon outfits and special effects are separated for the gacha as well, even though the special effects are meant to come WITH the outfits. They stopped updating the ticket shops, which are the F2P currencies that your earn from everywhere. They eventually added new outfits to the shop, but they can cost nearly $40+ USD to buy. Originally you could buy things with a few tickets which were decent, or buy prettier/cooler outfits with A Lot Of tickets. Tickets are pretty much predominantly earned the most from ranked. Eventually they just stopped doing that and made things keep costing real money, and tickets instead basically became fodder for leveling up your held items, or the outfits cost twice as many tickets as things used to. Other than the shops, there's an outfit gacha, which also has a chance to drop special outfit exchange tickets. They stopped updating this entirely. I don't think they actually added anything new to this since the game launched, unless it was adding a few newly released Pokémon to the exchange. It's completely F2P, so of course they didn't. There's gacha for tokens as well, which randomly drop special power-up badges that give stat boosts, and in order to level up your tokens you need to get duplicates, which means you need to keep playing the gacha, and playing any competitive mode means you need tons of badge builds for every role you play. Every event has a gacha, a game with random chance, a way to pay for more tries, a way to earn more tries, encouraging you to spend hours and hours playing the game like it's a second job if you don't want to miss out on cosmetics or be weaker than everyone else. The game actively punishes you for not spending as much money or time on it as other people by making you noticeably weaker. My god, there's even an event to play the game to earn the newest overpowered Pokémon before it releases to the public, or you can just flat out spend real money to buy it and play before everyone else. And some of the events have, surprise surprise, gachas! They introduce increasingly more powerful Pokémon to control the meta by creating characters that are impossible to defeat and deal unhealable amounts of damage to opponents. Every new Pokémon also costs MORE than the last, and aeos coins are a pain to earn and save up to the point where it feels like you have no choice but to just soend money to buy new releases. The game went extremely P2W very quickly, to the extent that even the casual game modes that should be fun and light-hearted (for the kids and players who don't want to play the 5v5 sweat mode maps) began to feel frustrating and unenjoyable. My niece, who should be THE target audience for this game because she's a kid, lost interest in this game the moment it started becoming one-sided and cluttered with events and gachas. When she realized how much money it would cost just to buy a dress for Sylveon she basically put the game down and never picked it back up. This game WAS fun when it came out and it was fun for about a year afterwards, but once again I'm glad it's going. I feel bad for anyone who spent money on this game. All that money they made and they still couldn't afford to make the UI not lag.