>>46611118Pokémon hasn't really changed much, it's just that players romanticize less about it as tech progressed and their imagination isn't going to fill in gaps in 3D.
The series has always been mid as far as videogames go. It's not that it's declined, it's that it stayed mostly the same while the older fanbase expects more of Game Freak or erroneously Nintendo, thinking everything Nintendo has in budget and work ethic for their flagship titles should directly translate to Pokémon games. It's not unnatural to want a series to try harder but the areas fans tend to attack are usually subjective areas like not liking a monster design and coming up with a set of rules for what Pokémon should look like down to a specific eye type or what isn't allowed in a domesticated Japanese RPG creature design or changes to its narrative framework like 3D characters being more expressive thanks to the flexibility of 3D modeling and camera work (that said, Pokémon battle animations do deserve better than trying to imitate the handhelds. That should be spread around) but those things are relatively harmless compared to things like viability of Pokémon that may have been worsened due to power creep or how the core game itself satisfies its definition of a Pokémon journey.
Some things like fishing for Pokémon worked because it was simple, making a whole fishing minigame that takes a few minutes longer just to encounter a fish Pokémon may be different but would that add anything to the game's experience aside busywork? Fans tend to ask for more tasks to be added in future games because they think it fleshes out the game more but will the changes be improvements or hindrances? Having an idea that sounds good on paper doesn't necessarily mean it's automatically good on the merit it hasn't been done before. At least things like Camping and Curry gave you EXP and Max Raids gave you rare items. Game Freak at least understands having abstractions like that have to incentivize the player.