>>40392099Pokemon Crystal.
Hear me out here. One of the major flaws in modern Pokemon games is the linearity and forced story. You no longer get to go on your own adventure, but instead everything is planned out to get you from one cut scene to the next, eventually leading up to an encounter with a legendary.
The seed of this was planted in Crystal, and grew into what Sun and Moon are today. Gold and Silver were as nonlinear as the series ever got, allowing you to skip gyms, get HM's out of order or without any hints from NPC's. It was up to you to get through that adventure. You didn't even need to get Ho-oh or Lugia if you didn't want to.
But in Crystal, Suicune became mandatory. Now as you played the game, you'd have small cut scenes (very minimal, but still), where you see him and some guy comes up and talks to you. Eventually, you have to have a mandatory fight with Suicune, regardless of if you care about him or not. The story of a legendary pokemon was no longer optional.
Then Ruby and Sapphire, which grew this, and made the legendary's the key to the story, and forced to you deal with them before going to the league. The mandatory story grew again in Diamond and Pearl, where you had to deal with those legendarys and the story was even more in depth. And of course, the obvious comparison HGSS, where you can see how much more mandatory story and handholding there is compared to literally the exact same game 10 years prior.
The trend continued and the cut scenes became longer and longer until we ended up with Sun and Moon, which is basically a visual novel at this point. You can't deviate or explore, you have to stay on track so you can get to inevitable fight with a legendary.
All of this grew out of that Suicune story in Crystal.
Side note: I love Gen 2, and Gen 3 is pretty good, Gen 4 had the physical special split. So the games still had redeeming qualities, but the virus of mandatory story grew into the death-nail of the franchise.
