Quoted By:
Why did Pokemon shift away from being an adventure and more towards being a story? In gen 1 and 2, you were just a random kid who ended up thwarting Team Rocket because you happened to be in the right place at the right time. Pretty much all the roadblocks in the game either required HMs or items. Barely any of them just disappeared automatically, you had to actively do something to get past them. Gen 3 and 4 started the trend of having fateful encounters with legendary Pokemon but the regions were still very open in their designs. Then gen 5 set the standard of having a region where you can only go forwards or backwards. Fast forward to gen 7 and the player has an encounter with two legendary Pokemon before they even get their first Pokemon and the game can barely go 5 minutes without running into a cutscene.
While the games have taking a number of steps forwards, I feel like they've really taken a step back in this aspect.
