>>46312706It's not exactly the non-linearity that I yearn for, it's the game design that tends to come with it.
Linear is fine to a certain extent, and in many ways ALL the pokemon games have been pretty linear.
But if a game is too on-rails, it doesn't allow for side content that isn't also on rails, which is what I think the alolan island tour generation really outlined. It was linear as fuck in such a way that it never EVER gave you places to come back to without the game telling you to. There was nothing to miss the first time around, either. Compare that to things like the Johto's unknown ruins, or places in Hoenn like the desert or the entire stretches of water that were necessary to traverse if you wanted to get unique shit. Hell, even unova, which is hailed as being pretty linear, had plenty of optional locales to return to in various cities and routes on top of the seasons actually changing them.
All the games I just mentioned are still linear as fuck for the most part, but they were designed for you to be able to benefit from returning to lots of locations. There are things you can easily miss, some things you HAVE to miss. Which makes the world feel more like a world, and not an arbitrary space between cutscenes and objectives.
ALTERNATIVELY you can make a game completely linear and hallway-esque if it's got fun gameplay on its own and/or a good story. Pokemon has neither. The narrative is rarely interesting enough to consider it a pure story game, and the gameplay HEAVILY revolves around building a party and finding new ways to use it, which flounders in a linear setting because now the game knows exactly what you should've done to get to this point and will give you a canned experience based on that.
