I'm sorry but this is too much of a get out of jail free card. Children deserve quality entertainment even if they don't know any better and honestly I don't see how kids would sit through the new games.
They're extremely hand-holdy and tutorial dialogue heavy in the beginning, the rivals are super friendly and the villain teams are goofy, there's little exploration, and they've gone from being easy with a little challenge to being a pushover. Red and Blue were hits and they just dropped you into the world after the rival fight and Oak's request. Where's the adventure now?
Anyway, you can very easily tie all of this to the fact that B2W2 didn't sell that well and a lot of staff left Gamefreak before XY. I forget who it was but one of the higher ups stated that everything from XY onward was made super easy and straightforward because he thought kids would drop it and go back to mobile games if they encountered any difficulty at all.
It's not just that fans have gotten older, they've made weird decisions and so far their cultural inertia has shielded them from it.
Extremely well said, you nailed it. I remember getting into a heated disagreement with one of my former co-workers about the difficulty of Pokemon games. I said they've gotten easy to the point of boredom and he said that isn't a real complaint and Pokemon games were always super easy. I don't agree with either of those sentiments. If too hard can be considered a flaw, so can too easy. Pokemon was never Shin Megami Tensei, but I watched a lot of an LP of Red not long ago and the new games have nothing on it in terms of difficulty. Like, the Team Rocket Hideout wasn't a ball-buster, but you had plenty of battles to go through and then Giovanni at the end, as well as a little floor puzzle. You might actually run out of PP and there isn't some NPC around every corner to fully restore your Pokemon before Giovanni. The game has a lot of glitches and you can easily break it's balance over your knee if you know what you're doing, but I am not convinced it's as easy as the newer games.
But sadly, as you said, the games have way too much momentum going and they will sell millions regardless of the bad decisions they make. Hell, the last two games have
sold better than most of the series up to this point. They really need to be humbled and have incentive to do better, they've been coasting for well over a decade now.
I cannot stress how linear they are, forget exploration, most places are like straight paths! This means the setting has so little character...
You also hit the nail right on the head, as usual. Don't really have much more to say than that. x) I would even accept really nice art direction, you don't need a trillion polygons per model to have a good looking game. The Switch could do better regardless. I mean, look at this. C'mon Game Freak, you can do better. Or maybe you can't with the current team, that's entirely possible, even probable at this point.
Hot take, but I'm 100% okay with Dexit, I'd be happy if they cut even more Pokemon and had better models, or at least better animations. I know some people play the series to "catch 'em all" still and there's plenty who would be super upset if their favorite Pokemans were not present. I do think that's an unreasonable expectation though. There's over 1,000 Pokemon now and that number will only increase, I'd rather them reel in the scale a bit and have a really polished experience instead. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter what I think. I believe in voting with my wallet and I will gladly do so, but unless you get millions of people to feel the same way, nothing will change. The heat death of the universe will render all of this pointless in the end, that's something to look forward to.
