The fact that if only for a brief moment I actually considered reporting the 5th anniversary trailer for scam misinformation
In all seriousness, while I’m not going to have a childish, immature response like that, I am going to come up front and say that this game has honestly been on a downhill trajectory ever since 2023. There’s been enough evidence for me to at least imply that August 2023 would have been this game’s original ending date as far as content updates are concerned (incidentally, this would have been around the same life cycle as another Nintendo mobile game, that being Mario Kart Tour) should the game have not been “successful enough” to continue beyond that point. To me, at least, this lines up with how after the PML Arc, Legendary Adventures, and the Villain Arc in the main story, any form of an overarching storyline this game had had kind of just been on autopilot ever since, with no real rhyme or reason for what’s going on aside from “it’s convenient for us, the developers”.
The ultimate problem I see with this 5th anniversary update is that the gameplay has caught up with the story’s lack of direction. Gacha game mechanics are already controversial to many as is, but the way these new units are being handled reeks of “that one time people hated Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon because they were just rereleases of the same two versions”, if that comparison makes sense. I don’t mean for this post to suddenly turn into a USUM diss track, but even those games made a genuine effort to make changes to its base counterpart in such ways that these monthly additions to Pokémon Masters sorely lack and struggle to keep returning fans from coming back to the game, even if many people would have preferred a definitive, single-version Alola game instead.
It’s not every day that I get this disappointed in a Pokémon content update, because at the end of the day, more content for someone’s favorite game should always be a good thing, right? But when Year #5 of Masters fell off as hard as it did compared to this game’s heyday and major criticisms about the game have yet to actually be addressed, this is a rare occurrence where, for the sake of the playerbase, I hope this game crashes and burns for the sake of the playerbase not having to deal with DeNA’s decisions anymore. Refunding players somehow after this would be especially helpful, but you all know darn well that a greedy mobile game company isn’t going to do that.
Edit: I will end this post off by reiterating something I remember telling someone in a reply to a YouTube comment last night. Situations like these make me wish we could still the dislikes on a YouTube video without the need for some kind of browser extension.