I don't really actively engage with Pokemon games... I kind of treat them more like idle clicker games. They're incredibly easy, the story usually doesn't particularly matter, and so I end up mostly half-paying attention to them while doing something else. Like watching TV or listening to a Podcast.

So the new Pokemon DLC is a sort of "big finale", where the random trainer battles you find around the map use actual tactics and build smart teams, which I could kind of get into except that, on top of that, all the battles in this DLC are Double Battles. Double Battles require a completely different technique than single battles, and allows for some clever comboes with Pokemon. But also this is the end of the game, and I've built my team entirely around single battles. So now if I want to play and not deal with annoying nonsense in every fight, I need to take the time to completely rebuild my team with a focus on attacks that synergize with each other. And I just don't care enough. The plot is boring, the interesting characters from the main game aren't here, and all of the new characters are really, really annoying. There's this truly awful brother/sister duo that the entire DLC revolves around, and they're both insufferable losers who I don't want to spend any time around.

I think for a better game I might be excited at finally getting some real technical challenges or take on a new area that operates in a refreshing way. But I just don't care. I didn't even mention that the DLC introduces these dumbass "missions" that you have to complete in order to build up points that you need to spend just to complete the adventure. Mostly they're annoying but doable... stuff that you'd probably be doing anyway. But there's also stupid stuff like requiring that you catch wild pokemon with a surprise attack (which is something the player character has always been able to do, but was never mechanically useful enough to justify bothering with). Or requiring that you take pictures of wild pokemon, which is something I completely forgot you could even do in the game, since there's no mechanical reason to do it, plus the controls really suck. Worst of all are the ones that require you to be in specific places... like requiring you take a picture of any random pokemon in a specific area, or one swimming (which is a huge pain if there's no bodies of water nearby), or requiring that you build a TM, which can only be done at pokemon centers. So if you're not in that area, you either just can't finish your mission, or you have to spend the points you get from these missions to get a fresh mission assigned, and just hope that it's one that's not sending you halfway across the map to complete.

What really got me to realize I didn't care enough to bother finishing this DLC was when I got an assignment telling me I had to make a specific kind of sandwich. A fairly common thing in Pokemon games for a while has been some form of food making... usually it involves a minigame, and it's never useful enough of a feature to bother with if you're not just a completionist trying to finish all the minigames the games offer, or if the usually pretty minor benefits that food provides would be useful for some specific thing you're doing at the moment. I probably could have just rolled my eyes and went along with that, but sandwich making sucks ass. It's easily the worst food-making minigame in Pokemon yet. The "minigame" is just selecting each individual ingredient, and dragging and dropping them one at a time onto the sandwich. And I do mean each individual ingredient... if you're putting tomatoes on your sandwich, you have to drag and drop 3 separate tomato slices onto your sandwich. And the ingredients have weird, stiff physics, and the drag and drop mechanic isn't entirely clear where the ingredients will drop when you let them go, since the perspective is a little unclear. So you have to pile a bunch of weirdly stiff, awkwardly shaped ingredients in a slow, boring minigame in order to achieve extremely minor and niche benefits. I think what somehow makes this even worse is the fact that you don't really find a lot of sandwich ingredients through regular gameplay. You have to go out of your way to visit ingredient shops in the world to purchase ingredients... and I never bothered, because why would I?

So, yeah... I just feel kind of like a schmuck because I paid real money for the DLC mostly because I just wanted to have more casual idle gameplay to distract myself with occasionally. And it's weird to say that I lost interest because what I got was "too hard", but I think the real problem is that none of it is interesting enough to justify the extra attention I would have to pay to it in order to get what I want out of the game. I should reiterate that it's not really "hard", it's still a kid's game, after all, but rather it's just all more difficult in a way that's frustrating and uninteresting, and I just don't care enough to engage with it the way the game seems to want me to.