Gen 7 killed the franchise for me, and I guess for a lot of people considering the activity online. Game is absolutely dead and no one cares about it, didn't even last a week. I myself stopped USUM about 4 hours in, glad I pirated.
I was super pumped to play Pokemon when it came out too so they didn't have to do much to satisfy me and still failed. To not let the mood go to waste I replayed my SoulSilver immediately after and had an absolute blast, thinking of playing BW1 and 2 soon this time with difficulty rom hacks.
It's strange because in every normiesphere I have access to people are clearly very angry about gen 7, but there's a lot of people trying to force it as being good somehow, like they're trying really hard to like it. I felt in gen 5 it was the opposite, lots of people enjoying the games and talking about it, but also a lot trying to force it as the worst generation ever, I don't know why, seemed like the opposite scenario. Gen 5 had such an active playerbase and lots of excitement, despite the normie meme of it being bad. Gen 7 is absolutely putrid and dead despite the normie meme of it being great.
