>>58707349If they didn't add it, the franchise would have become stale and died off. It adds to the depth of the setting and makes it more interesting than "here's a world where the adults are all either irresponsible, useless retards or criminals, the kids are sent out into the world with dangerous monsters to participate in legal cockfighting, all for money and a chance for the nebulous title of champion, whatever that means" repeated for 3 decades. Gen 4 was the shakeup teenage me needed to get back into the franchise. As a kid, I hated gen 3. I didn't like the map, I didn't like I couldn't use any of my old pokemon, I didn't like the pokemon that were added, and then gen 4 happened with DPPT and drew me back in with a region that was fun to explore, new pokemon that I liked like Luxray and Staraptor (cue the "all sinnoh teams are the same" memes I suppose if you must), old pokemon I liked from gens 1-2 coming back and even some getting new evolutions, and the new lore, the idea that sinnoh is some important place in the pokemon world, really helped me as a high schooler be invested.
So no, it wasn't better before they added the "cosmic lore bullshit". I'm not blind to gen 4's faults; it's slow, DP are a bit incomplete, and platinum has the distortion world which is the biggest waste of time in this entire franchise, but I would rather have had it as it is than as just gen 1 all over again. And, not being completely blinded by nostalgia, I can say that I think gen 1 is steaming hot dogshit and you couldn't pay me to play it over FRLG or even LGPE. That's right, I would rather play LGPE - with its actually fun catching mechanics as opposed to mashing the item button for 40 minutes praying an ultra ball catches - than the void of content and deep, full pit of buggy garbage that gen 1 is.
Fuck you, fuck your member berries, fuck all if t.
