Pokemon games kept getting better and better until X and Y came. 5>4>3>2
>>7>>1>>
>>6Sugimori's watercolor style wasn't very good. Sugi's best style was his early Gen 3 to early Gen 4 style. After that, his style started to become less unique and less detailed.
The only badly designed Pokemon is Zeraora. Designs like Trubbish, Vanillite, Muk, Voltorb, etc. are all fine.
XY is far worse than Gen 7, with the exception of its online. The Pokemon designs and the online were the only saving graces of Gen 6.
XY's soundtrack, character design, region design, and story are all of subpar quality, ranging from mediocre at best to unacceptable at worst.
XY is unsalvagable as a Pokemon game, and if you wanted to make a better version of it, you'd have to nearly start over from scratch, only keeping the Pokemon designs and inspiration for the region.
ORAS is the best pair of games in the 3DS era, and that's only because ORAS is a remake of a good game. It still butchered Hoenn, but even the butchered Hoenn of Gen 6 is better than everything else in the 3DS era.
Gen 7 had really great character and Pokemon designs. Gen 7 also had a lot of great ideas and concepts for nearly everything, but many of these ideas and concepts were either poorly executed or never fully realized. Gen 7 easily could've been the greatest game in the series had it not been so focused on handholding, linearity, cutscenes, and Lillie.
Gen 8 is nothing to get excited about considering the past performance of every title from X and Y onward, and especially considering the fact that LGPE even exists.
While real-time combat would never be feasible for any kind of mainline title, a real-time combat action game that's a blend of PMD and Pokepark would be awesome.
