You guys can't seriously think that Pokemania died because of anything specific that any one generation did, right? Obviously Pokemon proved to be a franchise with staying power, but there was no fucking way that it was going to remain the cultural force that it was when it first released. I can't think of a single franchise that remained at that level of notoriety for longer than Pokemon did, and the fact that it lasted through 2001-or-so is amazing in and of itself. Hell, it's impressive enough that it managed to retain such a large audience after the fad died out.
tl;dr Pokemania would've been gone by Gen 3 no matter what, unless Ruby and Sapphire somehow managed to reinvent the wheel and be the greatest games in the franchise by a wide country mile.
>>39145792That's really not much of a "core gameplay mechanic" though. It's like saying that RSE removed a feature because you couldn't go to Silph Co.
>>39146783The level of story featured in Gen 3 was perfectly fine and it didn't really get intrusive until Gen 4 (and I'd argue it wasn't a problem until Gen 5). The issue is that, with the way these franchises work, there was absolutely no way that they were ever going to go back. You've got to escalate things with each iteration, or at least that's the mindset of most executives. So I'd still say that Gen 3 made a mistake by including a world ending plot as part of its campaign.
