>>38890121Nah. They were fine as a transition to a medium Gamefreak clearly didn't know shit about. They were already shitting the bed making simple 2d games, so 3D must've been utterly unapproachable to them. I honestly expected their first foray into the 3D realm to be utter shit, but from a purely technical standpoint, they went all in. When you think about it, this is the game that introduced the biggest number of gameplay additions right alongside Gen IV, with the most notable being a temporary in-battle macro buff with visual changes that heavily altered the Meta (M-Evos); A more intuitive way to max EV's (Hyper-Training); More interaction with the Pokemon themselves (Amie); The absolute best Online system Pokemon ever had; and of course, the jump to full blown 3D and a pretty strong Dex with lots of good pokemon in a region with a good layout, alongside some more gimmicky, but cute additions, like riding certain pokemon, Skating stuff, easier breeding among many other little things. Add to that the fact that they did all this while also creating 3D models for over 700 pokemon and you'll realize that this was maybe the only time Gamefreak actually had to prove that they could actually handle a bigger project.
But of course, the fact that Gamefreak focused so much on the technical side meant that the presentation suffered. That's the only thing that makes it "unmemorable" in people's eyes. Story wise it was a downgrade from its predecessor and character interaction was clearly phoned in last moment (why are we supposed to give a shit about AZ, again?) with the Gym leaders also being non-entities for the most part. Post-game was bad, but not terrible. I still don't know why many criticize it so much.
A Z version that fixed those details and focused on the presentation now that the technical aspects were accounted for would've given us the best games in the franchise, but Gamefreak are retarded and didn't make a 3rd version of the game that needed it the most.
