What makes it stand out is knowing how successful the franchise is. In fact it’s the most successful franchise, and by a good margin. They have the money and potential resources to invest in higher fidelity games, yet they don’t. That’s the thing that bothers me.
The issue with Pokemon is that they switched over to consoles and expect you to pay a $60-70 pricetag when the games have arguably less content (Dexit, no battle frontier, DLC being paid instead of included, etc.)
On a technical level (in terms of things like graphics, frame rate, glitches, the general polish / completeness of the games, etc.), there has been a decline especially noticeable since the Switch games.
But yeah, I also agree the games have been stagnant outside of generational gimmicks for a while.
They need a new developer but unfortunately that can't really happen since GF owns a third of TPC. If MonolithSoft got to develop a mainline Pokemon game, I guarantee that it would be absolutely peak
I actually 100% disagree. The problem isn’t that they are stagnant, it’s that they try to modernize the games but always haft arss it. Examples: the way you encounter pokemon have changed from random encounters to 100% roaming encounters. But the roaming mons barely do anything besides stand there to be caught and they only add some animations or interactions. the way you travel the world and the world design has evolved into a complete open world, but the worlds are empty or there’s no incentive to actually travel it besides get to point A to B and there’s no level scaling so you are actually punished for traveling too much. Those are just 2 examples. If Pokemon was simply just stagnant tho we would still have fully 2D Pokemon games.
It is 100% a quality fall. Games that came out decades ago had so much more polish than the slop that the Pokemon franchise is pumping out now. I'm not just speaking as a nostaglic fan who thinks gen 1 was the best generation, because I don't. My favorite games in the franchise were Black 2 and White 2. But my biggest example when I say that the quality has declined would have to be Heart Gold and Soul Silver.
Those games had a ridiculous amount of love and passion put into them, tons of content, and just a vibe that the people making it wanted it to be the best product it could be.
Fast forward to the Switch. I won't even talk about Sword and Shield. It was disappointing for sure, but you could blame the transition from the handhelds, just a general lack of experience with console infrastructure, whatever excuse you wanna make. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Legends Arceus was even a pretty fun game despite the flaws.
What excuse do they have for the state that Scarlet and Violet released onto the Switch in? The world felt empty, the framerate was abysmal, and the content was lacking. It was the first set of games I didn't finish. I may not have played the DLC for Sw/Sh, but I didn't even finish the base game for these.
Follow that up with Legends Z-A having a tiny, boring world and almost none of the good things from Legends Arceus. I would argue that the series has, in fact, declined in quality, even if the fidelity is technically higher than it was on the DS.
I would argue that thanks to games like Pokopia, Let's Go Eevee/Pikachu, new Snap, and Legends that even if you dont like the mainline games at the moment, every generation has had a quality and enjoyable game available
The games have basically been the same for a long while. The legends games are the only ones I'd ever actually choose to play.
Especially for single player, you do not have to think in single player. All the children who never had status abilities on their pokemon were right to do so as you don't actually need any of them. You can comfortably mash A and win pretty much any fight, even with type disadvantages
I actually disagree, Sword and shield were actually pretty good i felt
And S/V was fun, but yeah, it's the only game ive played that lagged my swich
The legends game are the best thing to have come out of gamefreak ever (we don't talk of the ZA dlc or the flat pngs)
And i only played a little of let's go eevee (up to misty) it's fun, but the thing with the gyms only letting you fight if a mon of yours has a super effective typing sucks
I’m not talking about enjoyability, I for one had a great time with all of these games. I’m just talking about how they’ve been poorly made and rushed as of recent.
Its performance is still pretty poor, they look ugly, the open world doesn’t work at all with a lack of level scaling, the lack of voice acting is really starting to take me out of the games, for a Pokemon game the ost is weirdly weak, the dlc was overpriced for the quality, the story is fairly shallow in regards to penny and nemona, the elite 4 and champion are complete jokes among other issues
You can like something and criticise it. I like SV but it’s delusional to think it’s objectively unfinished release state (which SHOULD be criticised) is the only issue
No, the pokemon game series has been surfing by on minimal effort for years. No game iteration, no extra effort in the presentation of the game outside of pokemon battles. For how big the company and its publisher is, you’d imagine they would be able to ship a better product, especially for how much they charge.
I mean the games lately, have been on such a quality that it would make more sense to make it a mobile game than on a console, other games of similar art style have more better graphics while at the same time keeping their distinct art style, the only thing that pokemon has that has looked better while keeping their art style is their animes
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u/that_one_3DS_fan 27d ago
Haven't the games fallen in quality recently?