>>37423435Alright, look. Let's lay this out in a way that makes sense. Pokemon's an RPG. Mario's a platformer. Let's make a more fair comparison with, say, Dragon Quest, who was responsible for Pokemon to a degree, as both it and SMT were responsible for the "using monsters in your party" concept becoming popular.
Dragon Quest has had very different worlds in all of its main games, and while there may be connections, such as the Zenithian Trilogy, they generally don't find themselves making constant callbacks to past titles within the main game, nor do they blatantly refer to them constantly and in a manner that detracts you from the world you're currently in in favor of the world it refers to.
While you're bound to have a run-in with the iconic Slime as your first foe, it may also instead be an entirely new Monster instead that has never appeared in previous games. The rest of the game typically keeps this up, equally distributing monsters both old and new across the entire game so that nothing ever seems too unfamiliar, but never too familiar either.
When it DOES come time for callbacks, it's usually in the form of post-clear optional content or spinoff titles that serve as a gathering of the ENTIRE series in some way instead of JUST one game, such as the Monsters series, Heroes 1 & 2, or serving as a completely new take on familiar territory entirely, like how Monsters:Caravan Heart, an odd one out in the series, used the world of DQII, but put an entirely new spin on it with new characters, alterations to familiar areas, a completely different story, and more.
>b-but Johto did that too!That may be, dear Anonymous, but it wasn't the first and last time they would do this, unlike Pokemon.
Builders also provided its own take, featuring an altered world of DQI where that game's protagonist accepts the antagonist's offer to rule along with him, only to be killed, leaving it up to the Builders' Protagonist to undo the damage, and Builders 2 follows a similar path.
