Scan spammer here. Always nice to see someone think of a use for these.
>>35112880This looks to be the case, and not without reason; presentation is more likely to bring in kids and curious, new people, then trenches of minutia like Battle Facilities that only have lasting value to the fraction of the players that go full hog enough to see their appeal in the first place. And Game Freak can rightly bet that a lot of those people will buy the games on impulse anyway and try to get their fill with a Battle Tower and online, the latter being the series' endgame anyway. That just leads to very short-sighted games, as we've seen.
Going 3D, even with all the potential for reusable assets, probably didn't help either. They are in the same situation Square Osaka is with Kingdom Hearts 3 ("Hey guys, we know you've been making simpler early 2000's 3d games for a while, but we want you to make a super HD Hail Mary, is that okay?"), to be sure, because while Game Freak isn't in the same visual ballpark, you know they're already working on Switch game #2.
So to confess my own ass-talking, ORAS is the only Pokemon game from this decade I've actually played at length (DS broke before BW released and I already had a fanatical decade's worth of burnout), and having heard the pacing horror stories of the rest of the 3DS era but knowing how literal Game Freak was with remakes I was intrigued to see where the pin would drop. They certainly bear GF's new excesses: Lisia and Aarune shouldn't block your path, Delta Episode would have been better as LESS of a story. But for the most part GF kept the extra dialogue to existing key scenes, and thus gave us sufficient narrative opmh (ponder for a moment that we live in a world where Magma and Aqua might be high on people's lists!!) without burying the pacing under gabbing friendos every route. Now, RS's story is irreparably wonky, but ORAS is a decent template of what a little restraint can accomplish.
