I also agree but for different reasons…
For those that live under a rock, Pokémon heavily relies on a weakness/strength system based on ‘types’. Both the Pokémon and individual moves have types. Hitting weaknesses will wreck faces, while hitting strengths is practically useless. This is an important preface to my point.
In the regular land terrain, you can find Pokémon of pretty much all types, which forces you to change up your own Pokémon to adapt.
In water terrain though, the Pokémon you’ll find, both in the wild and on trainers, is 99% water as a main type, and it is here where we come across the real problem.
Without any grinding, you can absolutely blitz through any challenges in those areas with a few reliable Electric or Grass types or even moves, to the point where it’s just not fun to do.
But at the same time, you have to go through these areas to progress, and the game heavily encourages you to use Pokémon/moves that hit weaknesses. It’s been teaching you to do this the entire time. which means most players will experience the drag and not set their own fun to counteract this. That is a legit negative.
It really is bad design. I have no idea how it became a meme when the criticism is so obviously linked to this
I think they just summed it up really badly. At the end of an IGN score, you’ve got compliments and criticisms at the bottom, summed up in short sentences.
‘over-reliance on Water Pokémon’ or ‘some routes are boringly easy’ would both be infinitely better sentences than ‘too much water’, which on the face of it, and without context, does sound like a bullshit bullet point.
The “too much water” was intended to talk about too many water pokemon, as well as the poor navigation of water levels.
To me, when people try to discredit ign because of “too much water” I immediately know their opinion is worthless because they didnt read the review and couldn’t piece together what the criticism was in the first place.