>>36161851No, the beginning of the end happened immediately after PokeMania (which was right around the release of Crystal).
After that, GameFreak tried to recapture that lightning in a bottle moment with RS by making them with the "this is going to be someone's first game, we need to start fresh so they don't have to worry about the previous games" mindset only to flop in that regard because the phenomenon was already over, and they killed it that much faster because Gen 3 couldn't engage in cross-gen trading with Gen 1 or 2, meaning a significant chunk of the dex, namely Gen 1 Favorites, were lost to the Gameboy Abyss.
By the time FRLG came, it was too late.
The normals had left, the children had grown into a "Pokemon always fucking sucked!" phase, and no one gave as much of a shit anymore.
Yet they were still determined to recapture it, so they proceeded to continue doing so with the same mindset, gradually trying to make the games easier while improving upon mechanics up until Gen 5, where they finally decided to mix things up with a whole new Pokedex and the least amount of callbacks to past titles prior to postgame, and a firm belief that they had enough mechanics to slow down for once.
Little did they know that those Western Folk who were the Children of PokeMania's Yesteryear, despite not caring about Pokemon anymore, still found it necessary to bitch and moan about a game they were never going to play to begin with to such a magnitude that TPCi couldn't possibly tell GameFreak that BW was well received in the West.
And that was the breaking point that led to Kanto Pandering out the ass starting with XY, and the casualization that would gradually add up to what we have with LGPE today.
