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The goal of open worlds is to create a large systemic game world where every inch has a minimum amount of engaging content because of those overlapping systems, while the goal of older Pokemon games was to reproduce the already adventurous setting of Pokemon within a game.
Making Pokemon open world kills this sense of adventure because everywhere ends up feeling samey and algorithmic.
A good example of the different approaches would be the way games handle weather. In Gen 3, weather was used to raise the stakes in parts of the story, and it was used in the world at fixed locations to make them feel unique. This is part of why Route 119 and Route 120 feel like peak adventure even though everything about them is directed and controlled. Weather in the newer pokemon games is just a dynamic system running in the background that makes it rain for a few minutes, there are no "rainy" moments in the game. Everything is the same.
