Here's a few more hot takes:
-After replaying Base BW, I think the story is overrated. Team Plasma COULD have been a great twist evil team, but the game quickly hammers it in that they are the bad guys by showing them beating a Munna up and stealing Pokémon from people. Also Ghetsis almost says the quiet part out loud when you confront him in Castelia City.
-There's no such thing as a "last good game/Gen", it's mostly just nostalgia combined with the inability to accept that a fan isn't a part of the target audience anymore.
-The QoL the newer games have made Gens 1-4 feel nearly unplayable. The only reason I would be playing something like Emerald or Platinum is for the Battle Frontier. Excluding that, I would take ORAS or BDSP over them any day of the week.
-Most Pokémon look better in 3D than 2D. Most of the "proof" that 3D is "lifeless" is either using a still image of the model, or just the idle animation, which is only like 10-25% of the whole picture. They have their own animations for each category of attack, there's animations for getting attacked and fainting, there's animations for stuff like being pet, showing affection, eating, which shows a lot more about a Pokémon compared to a sprite that only MAYBE has 1 looped animation. Again, I think nostalgia plays a role in that mindset.
I agree with all but the first point, though I’d say that one really just comes down to a matter of preference in how the story is approached.
I think it's valid to complain about what it's supposed to be one of the most beautiful looking and alive cities in the Pokemon world, and the next gen console graphics are not doing a good job conveying that. Worse is that it's not like there's a variety of areas in a wide region like other games which would've been a bigger challenge, Lumiose is the only place in the whole game they had to get right, and they didn't
I'm saying this despite me (kinda) liking the game
Your average player wouldn’t have any way of knowing this, but we’ve seen in the leaked beta builds that the buildings were originally more detailed, which makes it seem as though this is something they chose to simplify for performance reasons. And, well, Z-A does perform pretty nicely!
I suspect that after the backlash to Scarlet & Violet’s performance, they may have decided to focusing on making sure Z-A didn’t have the same problems. But every choice is going to come with a cost somewhere. One could still articulate the critique that they would like high-level graphics
and performance, but if Game Freak were to make that a prriority, then time is going to be more of a factor, and the game was already delayed once. I’m sure some people wouldn’t mind the game being delayed even further, but delays also tend to mean higher production costs, and a lot of Pokémon fans go a bit feral if we don’t have news for a long period of time. I’m not saying there’s any right or wrong preference here, my point is just that there’s
always a cost, and I think we can see what Z-A’s were.
So isn't the fact that continuing to want those features puts someone outside the current target audience an indication that there has been a significant change in the series' priorities and that it isn't solely nostalgia?
Well, they did say nostalgia
combined with not being able to accept having drifted outside the target audience. They could both be contributing factors for why one considers a particular generation to be the “last good one.”
Personally, I don’t really have an issue with someone not liking the games anymore past a certain point; everyone’s got their tastes and all, and if the series isn’t aligning with those anymore, then it’s only natural to see that shift as a decline.
I do, however, bristle at the rhetoric around this stuff, as it’s so frequently in the tone of “The devs don’t care anymore / they just want to milk it for money.” Back when it was current, Gen 5 was my own favorite generation, and at that time, I was always annoyed by people who would trash it because the games “stopped being good” after Gen 1/2/3 because the discourse was always so hostile and incendiary, and these days I
do see people who loved Gen 5 behaving in much the same way, and it really just gives me second-hand embarrassment as a fan of Gen 5. Even if I don’t like a subsequent entry to something as much as I liked a prior one, I make it a point to try to never be
that kind of obnoxious about it. You can be critical, sure, but by and large I think people are just really bad at being reasonable critics. To some extent, I can’t fault them for that — humans often react with emotion first, and most people are laymen when it comes to understanding the production process of anything.
But I feel like it goes a bit past that when people so often seem to assume that the ones who are making the game are responsible for
failing the consumer. That’s not simply being disappointed with something, that’s looking for someone to blame. We rarely seem to consider the possibility that maybe the developers have valid reasons for their choices and that our own priorities may actually just be the minority. It feels like it can never just be a practical thing; it always has to be framed as some kind of decay. Though, that’s a problem that goes way beyond just the Pokémon fandom.
