>>43088190I also want to add that right now for most people, Pokémon is a safety blanket. It's not necessarily nostalgia for the diehards who bought USUM, LGPE, and SwSh, nor would I call it buying a game because it's good. It ties to the same reason the nostalgia crowd buys it though, and that is because it provides a sense of security because it's always been there. There was a lot of backlash to the backlash because people felt like others were trying to rip that security blanket away from them.
I stopped caring about the main series a few years ago, along with the majority of the franchise. Yet I'm still on this board. I was one of those kids who kept playing Pokémon because I genuinely liked it and not because it was popular. And as I got older, I tried to have a more critical mindset to understand why I liked the things I liked, and also to appropriately address the issues they contained. I can like something, but that doesn't mean it can't be improved. Anyone who has ever wanted to make a video game has thought about game design to some degree.
So to me, I stopped seeing Pokémon as a source of comfort, even though I felt pretty confident in buying any game with a Pokémon logo on it as a kid. I try not to be like that anymore, mainly because I would feel more and more burned if I did. The series basically has lost all the reasons I liked it to begin with and I can't even really respect any of the new things it does because it's rarely done well.
