I'm not averse to edginess but Reborn has so much edge that you get a cut even with protective gear.
Reborn goes for the realistic depiction of a Pokémon world which works quite well but fails miserably in other places.
It has the problem of having serious stuff happening but lacking responses, the first thing you witness is a terrorist attack on a train you barely escape killing dozens of people, and with a woman grieving her lost fiance right around the corner, that wouldn't be so bad to hammer home that team Meteor means business. the people are down and there are homeless and street urchins all around, city looks like shit.
All fair and good, now you find out that the team meteor plans some shit and charges the place, good time for some payback, the first battle you defeat the grunt, and...he surrenders and you let him go free of charge?
Yeah, mons defeated fights over what can you do carry-on villain until we meet later after you trained some more, ah who cares for the griefing survivors of your terror attacks.
That is the problem here, it happens again and again, the story emphasizes how everything is in the gutters but the people that are responsible just get a slap on the wrist and can go on, it feels needlessly edgy with how shit everything is and actively points it out but does not carry through with its tone and falls back into the pokemon trope were the baddies are more useless, which is a problem since in the normal games the evil guys are just bumbling bafoons, not murderous terrorists.
Most NPCs are either neutral or downtrodden and it gets emphasized how many people died through all of that and I only reach the part where you look for the doc for the 3 gym leaders.
Every second NPC has some tragic backstory or lost someone close to them but when it comes down to a point where you would be recommended to cause death the game chickens out and goes, nooooo this is pokemon you can not kill the baddy.
You for some reason meet all the gym leaders and shake hands with them like somebody wanted to show you all the coll OC they created.
What now broke the camel's back was the scene in the asylum with the doc you needed for the 3rd gym leader, like the moment the young women stormed out I knew shit is going to be edgy,
And lo and behold the NPC tell me they are gym leaders and the women on the run are an elite four, but since they are under 18 they need to stay here and the doc gives them"therapy" with an electric pokemon and is for sure not a crazy german scientist that does human experiments, they straight up talk about how he very well killed people, how is this guy still in business and not behind bars?
If shit is going down then the world needs to react accordingly in its response.
The idea of such an asylum would not be bad but adding it on top of the grimdark world turns it into edgy stuff, it is just too much, you need a certain balance for things to work, either good and bad balanced, full-on happiness like in mainline pokemon or grimdark through and through.
This game feels like the grimdark version of the uncanny valley, it went too far in but not far enough and turned edgy.
If you defeat the team meteor guys, knock them out for later clean-up or straight up kill them not let them run away, and you should need to reload if you lose against an "evil" person not start over in the poke center.
I like the realistic depiction of a world with pokemon but it is kinda immersion breaking if you can say: "I bet he is evil or does evil shit", and be correct 9 out of 10 times.
I read that large swaths of stories from the game are created through the forum and real-life stuff of their people, but if you only gather the bad that happens in one place it makes it not better quality-wise.
So now my question is, does it get better later on or stay in this uncanny valley of grim darkness?
Because the game is good and the fights are satisfyingly hard but I'm running out of bandages.