>>55768365I'm just gonna be frank:
I never cared that Pokémon was 2D even in 2010, I never cared that everything in the games was really basic, even with the 3D games, I didn't even really care that the games post-gen 4 were extremely linear (I appreciate what gen 2 tried to do, though I prefer gens 1, 3 and 4 in the ways they break the linearity overall).
The biggest problem I had was that the diversity of Pokémon, specifically early-game, tends to be very finite, especially for repeat playthroughs. Gens 8 and 9 hardly fix this issue (arguably they don't do it any more than 6 or 7), and unless they let you catch later-game mons in future generations early without completely breaking the balance of the game, I'm always gonna consider the open world games inferior to the more linear ones. At least linearity allows for more interesting story beats since everything is always in the proper sequence, 90% of the "fun" in gen 9 is basically just grinding against mons you shouldn't be allowed to fight yet.
