- I didn't enjoy the trials (except maybe the Ghost one, and Totem wishiwashi was a cool idea). They were just SUPER short, and honestly just not really entertaining or even challenging. The totem Pokemon were decent themselves, but honestly if you had the right Z-crystal in certain ones, they were downright easy.
Totem Pokemon have the right idea on boss battle compared to gym leader though, that is stacking the odds against the player. In majority if not all Pokemon games, players always have more options than their boss opponent like more Pokemons, healing items, or battle items. In other turn-based single player games, this advantages usually compensated on the boss side by vastly outpowered the player via raw stats or strong moves. However in Pokemon games, most of the boss (gym leaders, team leaders, etc) weren't given that advantages as their Pokemon still works on the same level as the players. Totem Pokemon
fix this by having an increased stats at the start of battle. Furthermore, Totem Pokemon will pits you against two Pokemon at the same time while you're unable to even the number by calling a second Pokemon. From single player perspective, this is the design they should keep for making boss battle against player feels challenging. Unfair, yes, but again players too have many tools at their disposal that rarely used by the AI too. If somehow Totem Pokemon replaced again by gym leader, I really hoped Game Freak keep this design in mind, either by having unique rules that the player must adhere, level and pokemon limit, or just pure stat increase.
Despite what I'm just said, the battle could be quite easy. Of course that would be the case since the game still designed for all ages audience. Not to mention that, if you utilized every battle options that available to you, you can always trivialize the game. This is always the case with every Pokemon game ever, only this time unlike in XY, you need to exploit the system a little bit more.
- Pokemon calling for help obviously. It just always happened at very inopportune times (sometimes fought 11 of the same pokemon while trying to catch one) and was just frustrating.
Agreed on this. SOS battle becomes a chore if you're completing pokedex entries without status mons in your team. The game does not properly tells you that status effect like paralyze and sleep disable SOS battle which makes it potentially more frustrating for people.
- Missed having a big city to explore with a lot of things to do. Getting rewarded with the random creepy ghost girl in X/Y in Lumiose City was pretty fun.
This is more technical limitation that anything. The game graphic was overhauled to look better and realized than what we had in XY. But such improvement come at cost of performance where the game runs at inconsistent 30fps even when played on N3DS. This is why triple and rotation battle get cut out from the game since it can barely handle double battle as shown by extremely choppy framerate.
Regardless of hardware limitation, big cities doesn't really fit well into Alola region. Alola wasn't a very big place and it is split into 3 islands of various sizes. It is made more sense for Alola to have multiple medium sized cities on each island rather than a single big cities on one island.
- The music was very underwhelming to me. (apart from the grand trial theme, seafolk village & gladion's theme imo) - I liked a large part of X/Y's soundtrack enough to even buy it lol
Don't know about this since I guess it can be pretty subjective. Rehearing XY music, it just have too much electric instrument to my taste, which is weird caused I don't think I have such problem before when I played it for the first time. While the overworld musics of Sun Moon mostly forgettable at times, it have the best
Victory Road theme across all the generation (undermined greatly by the shortness of the Victory Road itself). The
trainer theme also quite decent, but the top of the cream really is the theme for the
Guardian Deities of Alola Islands. I guess overall BGM of Sun Moon is inoffensive and forgettable at worst, but when the BGM at it best, Sun Moon can easily beat the others on that department.
- Very linear (until pretty late in the game) with any chance of exploring blocked by Pokemon doing random things...
This is another price to be paid with the games put more emphasis on story. While I firmly believe that good story and open design to Pokemon region isn't mutually exclusive, they need to make the game linear so the story could work. Thankfully though, in my opinion, it's worth the paid off since the story was executed really well. I don't mind linear Pokemon game if there's something to replace it. The focus on the story makes me feel that Pokemon Sun Moon is having a different sort of adventure from the previous games, which bad or good depends on your own view of Pokemon games.
- Team Skull grunts are just so horribly useless, and at least to me, not really entertaining either.
Yeah they are useless, but I prefer funny and silly team rather than stupid teams that take themselves too seriously. They are less grating and does not makes me grind my teeth every time I encounter them.