11-20-2023, 08:49 AM
(11-08-2023, 02:39 PM)Aquatically404 Wrote: Pokémon
I used to love it but I just can't find interest in it anymore...
I would preorder every game but when I played Scarlet and Violet, it kinda made me realize that these games are for profit now. Nintendo, crushing childhoods like goombas.
Trust me I TRIED to like Scarlet and Violet and I kept blaming myself "Why isn't this game fun? Maybe I'm playing it wrong" but it's almost like Pokémon has lost it's magic. I sold my copy of Scarlet after finishing the game and haven't looked back.
Funny enough Sword and Shield are my favorite games of the series.
You've hit on something that some of us older pokemon fans realized for awhile.
Putting aside childhood nostalgia, Pokemon actually served as a really good time killer for adults when they have nothing better to do in the same way that the developers of Neopets did so for college students.
It wasn't intended for that, but for those of us who grew up with the mainline games this arguably became true back when they were actually evolving the franchise for the better.
Then.... what happened?
Game Freak hit on something and it became so big that they felt obligated to pipeline pokemon games. Them being made for profit is a symptom of this yes. But the fact of the matter is that after some time through no fault of their own they decided to try and find the next big thing that would work for them and created two separate teams, one handling pokemon while the other trying to figure out the next thing that would match the success of the original pokemon games under a different IP.
This resulted in having a downward quality of the games where they ended up remaining too formulaic gameplay wise. Sure, they've tried experimenting with different ideas in how to get the games to feel different but the core of it remained pretty much the same without really evolving the games to the point where they become stagnant. The problem started back in gen 6 when they tried the mega-evolution bit, but it started to become obvious by gen 7. Shit hit the fan in gen 8.
That's caused older fans like myself to fall out of it, but it's not just a case of people getting older because if you're a big fan of something it never really leaves you.
The reason is because Game Freak inadvertently stagnated the series and some of the older fans feel isolated in favor of newer fans on one end, the other is because there are those who have become disillusioned to what Game Freak is doing with the franchise at this point. Sometimes it's both.
They had so many opportunities to build on the things that they previously brought into the game starting with Gen 6 but they decided not to do this in favor of gimmicks and they're still trying to do this and ultimately, it's getting to a point where this business strategy is not going to work anymore and they're going to have to throw the gimmicks out of the window and do what they were doing between gens 1 and 5 and learn from what made those games good fundamentally. Hell, if they can pull something like Genius Senority did with Colleseum and XD to appeal to older fans while still focusing on building on the fundamentals from Gen 5 onward that might lead to a renaissance and expose those who got older back into the franchise and not just based on the transition from console gaming to mobile gaming, but a true revitalization of the franchise.
But at this point there's too much uncertainty with that.