>>46290199>define player agencyI don't need to. The definition is out there.
https://youtu.be/vG3tCQHB5Rw?t=668Pokemon has always been a game defined by player agency. The series got popular in the first place because of schoolyard rumors of Mew appearing. Without some sort of freedom for the player to have different experiences than one another, Pokemon is a shell of its former self.
The beauty of older games was that players would literally be making their own journey. Maybe one player took the long route back to Lumiose in Kalos, while others ignored that and just flew there. Some never even went back to Lumiose to explore the new things that became available and went to Dendemille instead. Alola and Galar don't have this. When people spread rumors about the legendary birds at the end of the caves in RBY they had to make the conscious decision to go through the dungeon. Some might have not even gotten as far as the birds and left. GameFreak needs to give the player the AGENCY to make decisions like this during the campaign again. I say the closest thing we've gotten to this is Poni Plains because it is. The player can make the conscious decision to go to Resolution Cave or to the Battle Tree, it's a small glimmer of freedom in an otherwise tightly-locked game. The issue is that you only get an option like this in the postgame. That's not fun, not when every other game in the series was built on that principle during the main game.
