>>35715808Gen V was a mixed bag, both in regards to designs, region design, and story. There are some decent designs in Unova, but needing to make 150 brand new mons while trying to fill the roles that you had old ones for was a tall order, and leads to a lot of them feeling like poor imitations. The region itself was rather nice with some of the terrain and seasons, but at the same time was when they started to get worse about artificial roadblocks and gave up on trying to make the terrain sensible. Why is there a desert between two major cities? Because they needed a desert area for all these desert pokemon. And as for the story, it was where they started to stray into having a lot of cutscenes and really firmly went for the route of having multiple friends/rivals. Very often you'll walk onto a route and bump into Cheren, Bianca, N, the shadow ninjas, or get a phone call. It's the exact stuff that people complain about Alola for. The only difference is that Gen 5 actually has a point to all of those cutscenes that actually culminates in something. It's not the greatest plot in the world, but it's a decent story for a pokemon game.
Gen 5 is where they hadn't quite given up on giving older players a challenge, but had started to move into handholding and cutscenes to not let new players wander off and get lost.
