I'm aware the game is universally lambasted but I'm having so much fun with it.
I was battling some woman and a group of five smolives walked by in the background and I noticed one of them had a black olive instead of a green one. After I won against the woman I ran up to the little one with the black olive and it was indeed a shiny. I named her Madeline.
The woman in the city who rates your pokemon's size says I have the thiccest jigglypuff she's ever seen.
spoiler
Sending out my tandemaus couple for the hundredth time only to find that they've started a family
is probably the most fun surprise I've ever had playing a pokemon game.
Not really. The gyms are easier than ever because the gen's gimmick makes them effectively pure monotype instead of slipping in something to catch up people who just use a single super effective type. Note that they still do that, but then turn it into a pure monotype of the gym's type using the gimmick. Combined with the lack of a clear order it's also easy to end up overleveling them horribly, like I wound up doing the highest level gym 5th and then just sweeping all the others without even bothering about typing using the same pokemon that swept that gym.
The team base boss fights are tougher than the gyms because they tend to have better type coverage despite still sticking to a specific type.
I haven't really found any difficulty spike the way Sword/Shield had and I clearly remember Sun/Moon as having a higher general difficulty level overall.
Scarlet/Violet also lets you completely ignore one of the longstanding difficulty sources and that's a lack of early access to strong pokemon, because you'll find a bunch of great pokemon just wandering around as soon as you're past the lighthouse instead of being locked into picking from a very narrow range. Granted, Sword/Shield had the wild area to let you partially bypass that and they have in general moved away from "alright you got your trash bird, some kind of mouse, and a bug, go fight this guy who's ten levels higher than the wild pokemon around and has a lineup with type coverage to shit on everything you can have except for two of the three starters, hope you took one of those lmao" as a source of difficulty and generally give decent pokemon with relevant types, but Scarlet/Violet blows that away and gives you access to way more good options right off the bat.
Which also means never even bothering with a lot of them, like yeah I could use this spider I caught but it has dogshit stats and nothing's weak to it so just why. Just sweep everything with like two pokemon and replace them as needed, nothing forces leaning on the shitty ones anymore. They're officially redundant at this point.