>>42628447At least w/ modern Pokémon, I think the shitty dev cycle probably holds back story writing. I think this is most easily showcased whenever the franchise has to make a console jump. Look at X/Y’s and SwSh’s “stories.” Lots of decent ideas (grieving immortal king, well-intentioned hypercapitalist extremist) bundled with shit pacing and no real exploration.
Even with the DS-era games, we got more story-driven stuff AFTER the franchise had some time to settle into the DS move (D/P/Plt v B/W/BW2).
If the games were less tied to a multimillion dollar merch mill, I’d think we would actually get mainline games with more in-depth narratives. PMD was by Spike Chunsoft and their devcycle isn’t tied to the Pokémon Company’s bs since they aren’t shilling nuMon in those games anyway.
