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As far as clickbait YT neckbeard commentary goes, this guy made a good vid, captured a lot of the sentiment very well. The problem with Gamefreak is that the games have always been bare minimum since gen 1, the world has always been cardboard with little to do, and filled with static, it's a small world NPCs. Gamefreak never made a game that felt truly alive, or interesting to explore. They did good enough for the 2000s, but if anything, this Decade has shown just how puddle deep the formula always was. Why does every trainer stand on a route, unmoving and static, saying the same thing over and over again, never moving. The games have had time and date built in to them since the DS (and again in GSC), and yet NPCs being in different places at different times is an underexplored mechanic, the most it ever got explored was with the Punch tutor in GSC, and fucking Lapras and Drifloon in their respective games. The fact that Drifloon appearing at the valley windworks on friday STILL blows people away and is a cause for nostalgia in many others is a problem. It is SO easy to program and integrate a time and date mechanic into the game for dozens or hundreds of other NPCs, and it's always been easy to do that and yet it's almost never been done. the ONLY thing this game series truly had to offer was a social experience that was robust in the early 2000s because people had gameboys and link cables, and was revitalized with Wi-fi in the DS generation. The Cracks were being to show 7 years ago, but it truly is the degeneration of the one saving grace of this franchise, the online social aspect, that ruined this series irreparably.
