Did they at least do anything about the fucking HMs?
There's less of them than there has been in the past two generations and as far as cut/strength goes, once they take effect, it stays affected instead of resetting when you return. I think you can also freely overwrite HM moves now too, which works nice with the whole infinite TM thing.
Either way I'm fine with them working on balancing and tweaking the current system, as opposed to completely overhauling it. Ultimately, the mechanics have been sets of smaller changes and new features that over the course of four new generations have completely overwriten almost everything under the hood, but it's still largely the same as it was since the first one.
Besides, it seems like this game focused more on improving
outside of the battle system. The flow of the game, the amount of story, the variety of the world, the quality of the visuals, use of dynamic music, the level of challenge, etc., were all very carefully worked on and are pretty significant improvements over past entries in the series (There are people who say that there's more story in the opening cutscene when you power the game on than in any of the other main pokemon games as a whole, and they might be right honestly).
So I suppose if you're purely into Pokemon for the competitive metagame (well actually you might look in anyway because dream world abilities have kidneypunched the competitive scene completely, but anyway), you probably won't find as much significant... but if you're not the type to enter that scene it's a difference that you can definitely feel.
EDIT: Oh yeah, they did a lot of little tweaks towards making the game play much faster than before, which might not sound like much but if you've been playing Pokemon for a long time, it
really feels faster.
So ultimately, it's not like a whole lot can be really qualified as "oh this mechanic changed", but rather the mechanics are packaged in a far better packaging this time.
