>>34918693You cracked the code, OP. Pokemon is a monster collector first and an RPG second. An an RPG it's actually really shit, the battle system is disgustingly unbalanced and Gamefreak is so incompetent that every attempt to balance this mess just makes it even worse, see; Fairy type, Mega Evolutions.
Even when GF tries to implement story, it's either barebones and uninteresting (D/P) or takes up an obscene amount of time (X/Y, SM). People like to pretend the story has merit but if these characters were put in any other series, they'd be laughed at. Gamefreak can get away with all of this because people will buy anything as long as Pokemon is in the title. Ultra Sun/Moon were the definition of low effort cashgrabs and still topped charts, so it's not like Pokemon is going anywhere anytime soon.
>>Why aren't the pokemon games just pure sandbox games?GF as a dev studio is
A. too small and lazy
B. would fuck up the balance anyways by either giving the player EXP share 2 minutes into the game, or some other way given their track record.
Depite all of this, people don't want to criticize GF and usually ask "if you hate Pokemon why are you here?" as if some of us don't WANT Pokemon to actually be good games outside of being a collectathon.
If you enjoy varied team building definitely look at some other series since you'll probably grow to hate Pokemon by the time you get to Gen 6.
