You know what I wish more people pointed out for the proof of soulessness? Think back to pre X/Y. Remember how every new game, one of the cooler aspects was seeing the same Pokemon you know and love with new, hand crafted dynamic poses? Seeing new artwork of your bros with personality? The animations were kinda shit (Crystal was PEAK Pokemon animation, fuck you if you say otherwise, that shit had personality) but still something new to look forward to.

Now that we have 3D models just being recycled every gen...it's so stale. It's so lifeless. Seen a Pokemon once and you've seen it for the next few generations with absolutely nothing new to it visually. I get why they did it - the more Pokemon they have the harder it is to balance the workload of making new things for everyone.

One way to fix this is to add new cool idle animations for Pokemon, make them more dynamic, make them feel alive. You've already saved the workload of creating new models for everyone, now re-invest those resources into having animators spice things up. Pikachu's idle animation should be sitting on the ground scratching its ear with its hind leg, Bellossom should be dancing around instead of stupid idle sway, etc. It feels so fucking BLAND because Pokemon don't even feel like they have personalities anymore. They feel less like creatures in a living world and more like fucking puppets. GF was right when they said that with higher graphical fidelity they had to change the direction of the games to have less vague visuals, but they executed on fixing the issue with the worst possible solution (long shitty cutscenes that try to show "expressive" characters that have fucking PS1 levels of facial expression, just fucking flickering face textures).

NOBODY
GIVES
A
FUCK

About the protagonist, their shitty ass journey, their faggy ass "rivals," their stupid piece of shit antagonist, whatever. We don't play the games for that. We play for the Pokemon.

GIVE
THE
POKEMON
LIFE.

Fuck you, Gamefreak.