Quoted By:
True, to some extent. But I think it's also more complex than that.
The 2D era generally saw improvements over. Even with BW's divisive shift in direction to a more linear game, the engine, sprite-art, presentation, and PvP saw big improvements over DP. Then with BW2's release, the 5th Gen as a whole was more or less forgiven for all of its previous issues. Unova had a substantially better Pokedex, post-game, and map design with more things to do. It's why many still consider Gen 5 to be the last good Pokemon era, and even one of the best, despite initially being problematic.
XY never got the same treatment as BW, and Kalos was left feeling unfinished compared past Regions. ORAS only made things worse by confirming fears about lowered difficulty and cut corners. Looking forward, I think that people held out on hope for the series because of context. SM was the 20th Anniversary game. Let's GO was a chance to reimagine Kanto on modern hardware. SwSh was the first proper home console release. Yet with all of them, we find more cut corners, more features getting removed, and more simplified gameplay. SwSh is also a special case as a $60 game with more potential than before. We were even told that it'd be for veteran players. Naturally expectations would be higher than ever. So when it fails to deliver, failing on even the most essential piece of Pokemon's gameplay (Dexit), it becomes the final straw.
Personally, XY was the last game that I really enjoyed. The improved online, playing in 3D for the first time, customizing my character and so much more. I overlooked a-lot of its shortcomings because of the shift to a new system, and how much effort clearly went into that. But with ORAS and then SM still cutting corners, I started to give up on nu Game Freak. Even Ultra Changes ended up shallow compared to sister games like Emerald, Platinum or BW2. Skipped Let's GO for how much of a transparent cash-in it was. I'll be skipping SwSh too.
