>>35289447Same, I've come to the realization in recent years that 90% of my investment for this series is in the Pokemon designs themselves. The feeling of seeing a new handful of Pokemon getting leaked in CoroCoro and imagining their place in the ecosystem is ALWAYS better than playing the games when they come out and actually encountering them there.
And even now, I think I'm coming to the realization of why Gen 7's prerelease period felt so lackluster to me, because even though I like a decent amount of Gen 7's designs now, all of them look so artificial to me, and back when they were first revealed, I thought almost none of them looked like "true Pokemon". Instead of looking like naturally-occuring animals, they all look so deliberately designed by artists to force two concepts together. Not to mention that everything looks so anthropomorphized these days, it's hard to imagine things like Tsareena and Mimikyu naturally existing in the wild. Even though I still tend to warm up to most new Pokemon, this is still a feeling that I can't quite shake lately.
