>>40421705I played since the very beginning, Pokemon Blue was the first game I ever played. I barely remember playing it, but clearly baby-me liked it enough to want Pokemon Silver, and so on and so forth.
Aside from just "I played it when I was young so I like it", I really appreciate games with a fictional, yet modern setting. I also just really liked the variety in teams you could make, as well as the trading aspect. It really pulls me into the game when I go looking for a rare pokemon someone wants for a trade and I finally get it and I get that pokemon I really wanted. It's simple, it's always been simple, but it fills this simple niche really well.
>What killed it?Playing through Pokemon Moon.
While I wasn't crazy about X and Y, I still played through it and enjoyed myself enough. The postgame, while bleak, still gave the Friend Safari, which was fun, and it had the PSS which was a solid online system and included Wonder Trade, even if you usually just got shitmon, it was still fun to just trade around.
Moon had nothing fun. It was a distinct lack of enjoyment. X/Y had its groaner moments, but Moon just felt like a chore to get through. Every area was just a generic tropical hallway to the next generic tropical area, there was barely any exploration, most of the gimmicks were mediocre, the pokemon availability was abysmal, and so on. After I beat it and I realized all there was to the endgame was the Ultra Fetch Quest and one Battle Tower that was literally just placed at the end of a hallway with one dinky BP shop, my enjoyment for the franchise was permanently fractured. I couldn't bring myself to have even the slightest interest in anything Pokemon for a good two years after that. I've only recently had my interest in the franchise come back, and I don't want another mind-numbingly bad game to ruin it again. I honestly want to like Sword and Shield so fucking badly, but I know I wouldn't. It'd take a miracle for them to be worth buying at this point.
