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XY just felt incredibly lackluster, especially coming off the heels of gen 5.
Began the era of Gamefreak going balls deep into the whole "KANTOOOOOOOOOOO" thing. Mega Evolution felt like a dumb gimmick to me from the start, so naturally Gamefreak centered the entire narrative around it. Sets the stage for the whole multiverse fuckery that ORAS and SM/USUM delved into later, which is jumping the shark in my opinion. Was the start of the infamous 3D era, which while I don't have any problems with how it looks, you can't deny that the whole thing is poorly optimized and frame rates utterly tank the second there are more than two Pokmemon on screen... which is why Gamefreak thought it would be a brilliant idea to introduce horde battles, where there are SIX Pokemon on screen at one time and the frame rate tanks to single digits, on top of a battle format that already takes an obnoxious amount of time to complete anyway. Also the inclusion of sky battles, a completely superficial and pointless battle mode that only served to stilt the animations of various flying Pokemon models for generations to come. Had by far the most forgettable music, main characters, and evil organization of the whole series. The "friend" group who licks at your heels the whole game is fucking terrible and completely bogs down the whole experience by turning it into nothing but a great big circlejerk over how cool and epic and powerful the player character is, all the while being sickeningly happy and upbeat the whole time and endlessly bashing you over the head with hollow morals like "pokemon are ur friends teehee" and "it doesnt matter who wins as long as u hab fun lol". Also started the trend of having little to no postgame content because "lol kids are too busy on their smartphones so why bother expending more than the bare minimum of effort"
I could probably keep going, but character limit. It's a pretty popular belief that XY is the moment when mainline Pokemon games died.
