>>56909257>>56909298As someone who's most familiar with the Explorers games in the PMD series, the way I see evolution in these games is an optional level of closure to a long chapter for your characters, primarily because (since these are games for deprecated consoles with heavy graphical limitations) the Mystery Dungeon games don't do a great job of showing any other kind of physical, visual character progression.
It nails the mechanical, with personalizing your movesets to your playstyle, while keeping you strong even in your base forms. And it definitely does a good enough job on the narrative level of progression, considering we're all here talking about these games. The only visual progression your Team gets in the Explorers games, before you unlock evolution, is the PNG of a badge icon in the menu when you're not in a dungeon, which honestly serves a more mechanical progression function than anything else, with increased storage space.
While I'm not a fan of Ninetales' overworld sprite in EoS, nor am I a fan of the botched sleeping animations and lack of portrait emotions you get when you do evolve (though apparently that can be fixed with SkyTemple nowadays), I'm still going to evolve them, because I went through trials and tribulations to save the world
two times over, resolved every character arc between me and my partner in the game's plot, and at the tail end of it all, I witness
Teddiursa go out of their way to seek evolution once it's available, and grow, as a character, into their new form as I approach the climax of the postgame plot.
TL;DR: visual character progression is good in RPGs, it makes my brain do the good chemicals when the story is done, and ultimately provides a complete experience (i would argue) for most players
