>>42916155They are. The storywriting is terrible, the world building is terrible, the mechanics are very simple and shallow, the games emphasize friendship and companionship but do nothing to add real personality or proper means of interacting with your team, they emphasize collecting and categorizing but give you fuck all to really meaningfully do anything with that either other than show your friends a bunch of sprites in boxes.
Gen 1/2 are the only series of games that are really good as games, and get a pass mostly because the Game Boy hardware is absolutely fucking anemic and hopelessly obsolete even by the standards of its time, what Game Freak pulled off with a fucking 8080 and 8 KiB of memory is nothing short of incredible. The games were also generally simple and didn't try to be anything more like the cringe story/cutscene-filled shit we have post-RSE. RSE themselves as well as DPPt also get something of a minor pass because they're still set in regions that aren't just a bunch of blatant regional stereotypes lazily glued together.
The games are just the only way of interacting with your favorite mons and the wider Pokémon franchise other than just writing shitty fanfic or art, as games on their own they really are not that good, you can see this with the major backlash against SS which other than the dex cut really isn't that different from any of the prior games.
