>>55053507Game Freak tried to make SV into a conventional and engaging modern JRPG story without actual effort put in. They tried to mimic many different approaches at the same time, tropes like time travel plots, last minute plot twists, conspiracies, AI, social event cutscenes etc.
Nothing about this region felt truly genuine in a way. This is the first time a mainline game is completely open-world but that's just because of fan complaint about previous regions being linear, there wasn't a real creative vision behind that decision like with Gen II's non-linear gyms, even if they were horribly implemented. It's all just audience appeal, pandering, or whatever you may call it, nothing really stuck. These Gen IX characters will still be popular but then again any important pokemon character becomes popular either way, even the most obscure ones, just because it's pokemon.
Game Freak had actual investment in making the world seem vast and open-ended in a good way, but now it's all open-ended in a bad way, because the bare mininum is overexplained while the real foundation of the story that constitutes as worldbuilding lore gets handwaved away, completely different from how it used to be during Gens I-V. That's why these are regarded as the golden age after all, they're what made the vast majority of loyal fans engaged in pokemon in the first place.
This shit ain't really pokemon, or at least now pokemon is a different brand from how we used to see it. You could say P:LA was the last hail mary of that facet of pokemon because it was nearly all past-gen pandering.
