>>45442656>>45442681>>45442709>>45443573"Soul" is generally used to refer to extra love and polish put into a game that in theory don't need to be there, but in practice feel rewarding and make the game feel more like something made for enjoyment, and less like a commercial product.
Soul is an inherently relative term, as different series have different standards for what needs to be in them, what counts as the bare minimum, and what counts as polish, but common examples of "soul" are things like extra cutscenes for returning to particular places at particular times in the story, dialogue that reflects if the player did something unusual, elaborate and detailed interactions between items/abilities and old enemies, possibly involving unique animations, or the ability to "play" within the confines of the game in a general sense. It might also include things like meshing game mechanics into the setting, characters that have extensive dialogue and feel like people, rather than piles of committee selected tropes that source well with X group, or general hard work making the game world feel lived in.
Basically, any time the game seems to reward the player for "playing" within the game, instead of just trying to beat it.
Examples of antisoul are arbitrary roadblocks and invisible walls, the feeling of being "shooed" along to the next big setpiece, static and unchanging worlds, holes existing between gameplay and the world presented, and so on. Worth noting is that as the relative expectations for a series increase, things generally provide depreciating values of "soul", and may even start to become negative. Half-hearted advancements can also backfire.
Pokemon from gen 6 onwards has generally lacked this; the main reservoir of "soul" the games possessed was Pokemon Amie, and a few of the side buildings in SuMo, where you could do things like buy meals. SwSh has again, small amounts with camping and curry, but that's really it.
