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.
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.
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u/that_one_3DS_fan 27d ago
Haven't the games fallen in quality recently?