Pokémon Let's Go: Maingame yeah, Postgame meh

So, I've now reached a point at which I can safely say that I completed Pokémon Let's Go. I just purchased the overpriced crown and all other accessoires; defeated all the postgame trainers including the Gym leaders, Green, Mina, Morimoto, and Red; obtained all TMs; completed the Pokédex; and maximized the stats of my team members by IV-chaining and feeding them with candies. This sums up to a total of 75 hours which is fine for a Pokémon mainline game. Unfortunately, this game continues the tendency present since X/Y of offering either an almost non-existent postgame or an extremely repetitive one.

First, we have the master trainers which are an utter disappointment. At first I thought they'd require a more strategically approach to defeat them due to a diverse movepool and innovative tactics. But, in actuality, they just have extremely buffed stats you cannot counter with tactics (unless you use a Toxic + Protect combo on non-Poison types), and you cannot defeat by leveling up. Which would at least be a reasonable time investment considering grinding Experience Points works rather well with a Chansey chain in Cerulean Cave and considering you can level up six team members simultaneously. No, what the game expects you to do is buff your Pokémon with candy and that's basically all you need to defeat the master trainers. Now, using regular candy is a horrible option since you'll want to buff at least five stats and in order to buff each one of them to its maximum you'll need around 400 candies of regular, L, and XL size. Since you can only carry 999 candies of each category and you first receive lots of candy once a chain is in the high double digits and every Pokémon only gives you one type of candy, it would require you to recollect candy from at least five different species and rebuilding the chain after every second buffed Pokémon. So that option is insanely time consuming. Less time consuming but still too repetitive for my taste is collecting 200 candies of the respective species, for example 200 Bulbasaur candies when buffing a Bulbasaur. Now, you'll most likely have to wait until the low triple digits until you receive those regularly. In avarage, I'd say a chain of 150 will be necessary in order to receive 200 candies in order to max out your stats. 150 might be enough to defeat most of the master trainers but only if your level is almost equal to theirs and once you reached 150 your chain will be high enough that reaching 200 won't take too much longer. Once you defeated one master trainer with a buffed up Pokémon, you can evolve it in order to defeat the master trainers of the respective evolution(s) without needing to recollect the candy.

Now since it has been established that I understand what the game wants me to do and despite the shortcuts I presented: this is still repetitive as hell. At the very least you'll need 75 Pokémon buffed. That's excluding all evolutions and those master trainers who don't require a battle. So if you want to defeat all the master trainers you'll have to build up 75 chains of around 150 species and just catch, after catch, after catch, after catch,...
This methode is totally fine for IV-chaining and Shiny hunting since I expect some work to go into building a good online team. But just catching Pokémon after Pokémon for 50 hours to come just to defeat the master trainers is so boring and repetitive, and one of the worst examples of grinding I've came along for quite some time. And here I thought catching a bizillion legendaries straight in US/UM and OR/AS was repetitive, this quadruples it. And it wouldn't be so bad if besides the Cerulean cave and some extra battles this wouldn't be the only postgame content available. Well except...

Secondly, you can get a Meltan and evolve it to a Melmetal. Receiving Meltan is quite straightforward: you just transfer any given Pokémon from Pokémon Go to Let's Go and you receive a Meltan. No problem here, especially considering Pokémon Go is a free to play product and thus, Meltan is not hidden behind a pay wall. The annoying part kicks in when you try to evolve it: you'll need 400 candies (keep in mind, the candy in Pokémon Go which works slightly different than the candy in Let's Go). However, you'll only be able to catch around 50 Meltans per week since the mystery box only opens for an hour on a weekly schedule. So, you'll need around 8 real life time weeks in order to receive Meltan. Forcing real life time into any video game, in my opinion, is always a bad idea since it prevents the player from experiencing the game at his or her own pace and forces them to play it on specific days rather than whenever they find the time. Daily events or acceptable since they can be repeated on a daily basis but whenever a game requires you to wait days before you can proceed, I have an issue with the mechanic.

So all in all, the postgame once more is a complete dumpster fire. Now, I'm not saying Pokémon needs an excessive postgame in order to work as a game. But as it stands, the game still lacks replay ability. The main story is rather average in length and straight forward in its presentation and the absence of any difficulty settings or New Game Plus features hinders any incentive to revisit the game. You can create a new team but the extremely limited selection of Pokémon and moves compared to other games even hinders that incentive. Let's Go lacks the replay ability and immersion of Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, has no engaging story with multiple paths as Octopath Traveler, has no interesting DLC content as Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and even the Multiplayer options are really lack luster this time around, consisting of only Single battles, Double battles, and trades - designed to only work with your Switch friends. Once you're done the game is just...over. Unless you want to engage in the extremely repetitive process of defeating the master trainers, there is no reason to revisit this game and Pokémon for that matter until Generation 8 will be released 2019. And considering Masuda's world view that may be by design. Nonetheless, it remains a sad factor of an otherwise good game.