>>43156863I think I could eventually get behind your argument in one end: even if you had a handful of Pokémon, if you could do a LOT of things with them then it would not really matter.
My opinion is that a good game, to qualify as such, needs to take a long time in comparison with games released in about the same time to be speedrun. That depends on the other games in comparison, but I think that is a good starting point. Then, the game must also engage the player into wanting to keep playing, which is far more subjective and harder to measure, but I guess you could measure that by the amount of players who make it to the end. A game that keeps you engaged enough to the end of said game, that also takes a long time even to speedrun, is easily a good game. JRPGs are skewed a bit because text drags all times down, but even then that gets amortized because all other JRPGs do the same.
Now. Apparently, absurdly long speedruns seem to start at the mark of 10 hours on (
https://www.thescoreesports.com/news/13977-wtf-gaming-absurdly-long-speedruns) and Pokémon SwSh only take over 4hrs (
https://www.speedrun.com/pkmnswordshield), pretty average (optimistically speaking) for a JRPG. So people are engaged, but these games are just short in content - whatever the definition of "content" is. Meaning we don't even have to define "content" to realize SwSh are mediocre.
And what a full natdex achieves in this context is the ability to squeeze the juices of the game by making the games last for way longer than they need to. Therefore, this leads us to an interesting realization: Pokémon are content not because you "have" them, but because the ability of seeing and DOING something with a Pokémon you do not have is content in and by itself.
