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So. I was not messing around when I said this one would be severe.

am i a reluctant pokemon fan ?

so far, both of the posts i've made here touch the subjects of pokemon/nintendo. it would be sort of stupid to make the third post ever say "i actually hate pokemon". so instead, i'll borrow the words a youtuber used to describe his relationship with kingdom hearts and call myself a "reluctant pokefan". why reluctant, and not ex you ask ?

for the simple fact that i still massively enjoy past episodes. in my life, there has not been a year where i haven't played an older pokemon game on a mobile emulator or dusted off the old 3ds to play some 4th/5th gen pokemon. while i've grown bored of a number of games that i have played too much during a period of time (dark souls 1 comes to mind), pokemon is really the only franchise i go back to; serving both purposes of being somewhat of a comfort game and genuine entertainment.

my latest emerald run, i had to grind like a mad dog to get my hands on a feebas

the reason i mention "genuine entertainment" like an android awkwardly trying to describe human feelings is because i know a lot of pokemon fans outgrew the franchise after discovering more complicated rpg/mon sagas like shin megami tensei, romancing saga, digimon and thus no longer draw an actual feeling of satisfaction and entertainment from the games. but to me, despite playing more rpgs over the years, i've never really stopped having fun playing the games. i will fully admit nostalgia plays into it, but it is definitely not enough to make me sink 40-50 hours into a given pokemon game (that i've most likely already played) every 6 months. the older games, while not being necessarily complicated gameplay wise (i remind myself sometimes that for the longest time the game was aimed at children) all have their own brand of uniqueness, which in my opinion, stretches further than gimmicks each game has. atmosphere, characters, the general artistic direction for the pokemons and the folklore for each generation makes each game worth playing for me. regardless of whether you think the battle system has not evolved at all in more than 20 years, that there the dressing aspect of pokemon has not gained any depth whatsoever, that the lore sometimes fails to stick together, that the game retain too much of their linear modus operandi over each opus, the pokemon experience offered by the older games couldn't be find anywhere else. all these examples of critics i quoted happen to be a few of the gripes i have against the entire franchise, which have amplified over the years.

Hence, my being a reluctant fan.

while what you've read so far has been almost like a letter to a long lost lover, what you're going to read is an aveu of hatred and disgust towards the direction taken by the games after the 7th generation (i personally judge pokemon sun/moon to be the last good games). don't expect an objective argumentary about why it's bad, cold hard facts or post ironic memes : i simply am going to express my hate for the mediocrity game freak subjects itself to.

i am not going to go into details about how vomit inducing the textures look (hint : i think it looks like actual gameplay from one of those crappy chinese mmorpgs that you see advertised on shady torrenting websites). how, in 2020, pokemon makes its first mainline entry onto a TV system which such godawful graphics, lackluster characters that somehow look inferior to the avatars from a prior mobile game (pokemon go) is beyond me.

lacking 3d animations, battles still load up in an enclosed area where the trainer is nowhere to be seen, pokemons remain static, simple looped animations with not even a god damn idle animation, something that mid 90s point n click games had for chrissake. it is unbelievable game freak went on about the pokedex not including enough pokemons as to concentrate on the ones they're going to be using when truthfully, you couldn't put less work into what's already in the game if you wanted. "it could be worse" yeah, sure, if they didn't just lazily re-use the animations from the 3ds

and you may argue that this had always been the case, to which i'll answer that the only example of gf being this lazy was the shameless copy/paste of the post-league house of battles (whatever its name was) in ORAS; considering the original one in XY was already incredibly lackluster. i actually suspect gamefreak started getting real lazy around that time the way, providing players with the bare bones minimum of pokemon games : expect that's the thing, it's no more interesting than a plain bowl of white rice with nothing on it. pokemon, at its base form, is rpg so behind and archaic that it could be called backwards. features that have existed for 2 decades in mainstream jrpgs such as wild life encounters and beast riding are seen as good additions, while the series was conditionned to smaller machines with weak technical capabilities, the limitations were excusable, but i refuse to ever pay for the undercooked pieces of garbage that nintendo has somehow been able to churn out at a faster rythm than back when the games were made for smaller formats; and on top of that, pouring a thick greasy nasty sauce of dlcs on top.

legendaries that no longer have any connection to existing folklore/mythical symbolism, flagship legendary pokemons being just recolors of each other. jesus christ, scarlet and violet were centered around the gimmick of motorcycle dragons being ridable and somehow nintendo manages to flip the middle finger by making said pokemons CRAWL on top of being extremely buggy

let us ignore, once again, the awful graphics (final fantasy XII on ps2 somehow looked better in its pixelated glory)

the problem is not the choice of gimmicks or pokemons whatsoever, that's up do debate, we've had for each ds game a gimmick to act as a placeholder of the lower screen, but there's no soul left, and as to define this vague concept; not spontaneity from the devs, no extra-work to make the player smile as he thinks "they didn't have to do this but i like it", like getting something on the house from a burger joint you already love. no, you can truly feel that even though nintendo has always been multi billion dollar company, they now decide to make money on unfinished games, capitalizing on a new demographic of older players who won't mind spending 50, 60 bucks on the lastest pokemon game no matter how shamefully mediocre it is.

i think i'll stop here as i would have to go deeper into detail, but frankly, i feel like i could go on forever, with more structure, and yet, it feels childish because this is ultimately the result of disappointment at the downhill slope a loved franchise that occupied a big role when i was younger is taking.

thanks for reading once again, and do tell if you've any objections or remark concerning something i said