>>38660132I vividly remember the death of Pokémania.
When a classmate brought a magazine with the first info on Gen 3 to school and I saw the starters I immediately knew something was wrong.
They did not look like Pokémon. They looked like random TV cartoons, something was definitely off. The magic of Pokémon behind Pokémania was just not in them. They had strange proportions, Mudkip had a straight line for a mouth.. You could not imagine these guys being real, they looked like toys posing for a Mcdonald's adv. As a kid you don't want to accept that the series you love is wrong, so I suppressed the thought, but in reality I was sensing TCPi's influence. Indeed TCPi was formed during gen 3's development because GameFreak could not handle the increasing workload coming from the merchandise demands, so TCPi was now in charge and Masuda directed the whole game himself full of doubts and anxiety as he has stated. He clearly did not know why Pokémon was special/how to replicate it
Groudon and Kyogre also looked very strange in comparison to Ho-Oh and Lugia, they looked robotic and unnatural and had an awkward stance in their original art. They were there filling a quota, these legendaries did not inspire any emotion of wonder for the magic of Pokémon world.
Fans were expecting an expansion on what we knew. More evolutions, regions to visit, expanding existing lore, but it all went to shit when we learnt we couldn't transfer mons, no visiting previous regions and not even a night cycle. A fuck you to our expectations and to things we liked. It was a soft reset of the franchise, with a new directive at the company and the change was felt hard. The names Ruby and Sapphire also sounded too elaborated, unlike the color names that we were used to. The whole thing felt forced, like they were just doing it for money repeating the same formula without a single care of fan expectations. It did not have soul. And Pokémania died right there.
