>>35638962I think it's kind of a similar problem that Star Wars fans had with George Lucas. A lot of people believed the prequels were not as well-received as the OT initially because Lucas had too much creative control over the movies. When he was making the OT, he was still beholden to his producers and other people when it came to budget constraints and content that slowed the pace of the movies. Since he was free to make the prequels as he wanted, he was also free of any sort of constructive criticism. You could look at Masuda the same way. If one artist has too much power and influence in a collaborative project, there's no filter on the bad ideas. The difference between Lucas and Masuda is that Star Wars was the brainchild of Lucas, which gave him the right to try to be an auteur, but Masuda was not the creator of Pokemon. The differences between the tone and stories of Gens 1 and 2, which were directed by Tajiri, and Gens 3 and onward, are very apparent. Masuda is the one who added pointless levels of anti-player hidden difficulty, which make the games convoluted, time-consuming, and inaccessible to newcomers (keep in mind Pokemon is for kids), as well as the mystical-magical cartoonish fantasy storylines instead of keeping the games somewhat grounded in reality with the suspension of disbelief that Pokemon exist as weird creatures in our normal world.
