>>40929899It probably wasn't just Masuda its impossible to blame everything on one man.
What happened most likely was Nintendo came to GF and told them they wanted Pokemon games made more regularly. GF is largely incompetent at making games in the sense that they mechanically suck and likely decided that they needed to cut massively to meet Nintendo's demands, Nintendo may have also suggested at least some form of dex cut to push out Pokemon games more. Its the classic example of a publisher demanding too much from the development studio and them making an inferior product from it. Nintendo and Game Freak also probably wanna roll back on the franchise to avoid the ceiling as they normally do in the sense that by removing existing Pokemon the next game can have less new Pokemon by adding older ones.
There were also other factors most likely, Game Freak probably didn't fight the decision out of laziness and a lack of passion for the franchise as an example but at the end of the day I find it unlikely that this happened without Nintendo's expressed desire for it to happen.
