and serve as Pokémon’s excuse for a 25th anniversary region
This is just an aside, but I don’t think they ever marketed Legends: Arceus this way at all.
Now, say you’ve never actually completed a PokéDex before this. I still haven’t, and while the Internet may have you believe otherwise the majority of Pokémon’s player base probably hadn’t either. Hisui is a unique environment in that the Shiny Charm serves as a postgame incentive for an activity you may already be interested in doing- but therein lies my biggest gripe. Shiny hunting is the only incentive for people to come back to most of the newer games after completing the main story, which is a problem because Shiny hunting itself is not strictly a postgame activity.
If there’s literally nothing else to do in the game once you get the Shiny Charm, that’s one thing, I can let that pass. But Game Freak seems to have some kind of impression that performing an activity that can already be performed during the main story anyways suffices for a “good enough” focus of postgame experience, and I just can’t agree with that.
Like Bakugames said, I don’t think this issue is causally linked to Shiny Pokémon in particular.
Take USUM for example. The game has three distinct battle facilities, and a minigame to help grind BP for Move Tutors, but only the Battle Tree is exclusive to the post game. The Battle Agency and the Battle Royal Dome are both accessible right away. In an older game, they might have held both of those facilities back until the post game in order to create a small Frontier-like place, but now they are foregrounded during the main game.
Similarly, if I remember right, the SwSh DLC really only gates the Galarian Star Tournament behind game completion. Whereas other battle challenges like Restricted Sparring and Dynamax Adventures have much earlier points of access.
If anything, I suspect this has more to do with the fact that not only do most players not bother with completing the Pokédex, plenty of them don’t even bother to finish
the main story. So putting the unique battling features (that a lot of development time probably went into) in front of players
during the main story means more people might end up giving them a try.
I think a lot of older players (and I’ve been playing Pokémon since 1998 so I’m very much included in this) still tend to think of Pokémon game design in pretty firm terms of “main” and “post” game, expecting the post game to be at least x% as substantial as the main game because we look at it like, “Well I finished the main story, so now what do I do?” But the games these days tend to be designed more as just “the game.” You have these experiences available to you as you progress through the main story, then once you reach that final pinnacle, you’re basically done. You beat the game, congrats, you can go back outside now, or play a different game or whatever you want.
The funny thing is,
most non-Pokémon games are designed that way, rather than with a “main” and “post” game division. It’s always amusing to me when I see someone finish the story in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom and say, “Wait, why did it put me right back before the final boss? You mean I don’t get to explore post-Ganon Hyrule?” Because games are, by and large, meant to be temporary experiences. Yes, enthusiasts will find ways of prolonging the experience (see: my over 2,000 hours of play time across BOTW and TOTK, or my probably over 10 billion hours across Pokémon games), but broadly speaking, you are
supposed to reach a point where you can say you’re done. Within Pokémon, Shiny hunting and competitive battling are very much things for enthusiasts, so GF have taken to providing post game tools for them to take advantage of. But I don’t think it’s the existence of those niches that are directly responsible for the erosion of post game content. I think that’s just GF adapting to modern playing habits.
