This series is a poor man's RPG. No honest-to-goodness RPG fan would actively pick playing Pokemon over countless other RPG series. The only soul reason one would want to play Pokemon is for the Pokemon themselves yet even the Pokemon are now on the feature-chopping-block list so now you're rolling the dice each following game/generation to see if your bro makes it or not. Least we forget that the monster designs are objectively getting worse and worse with each gen, giving you less incentive to want to add them to your roster of bromons.

The entire series is woefully behind on the genre that it's both laughable and depressing. Difficulty settings are practically standard for modern RPGs yet only once was it introduced to Pokemon and it was not only locked behind post game, but it was further locked behind a weird-ass key system that required both versions and 2 DS'. Cutscene skipping (as in, actually skipping all forms of cutscenes, even basic dialogue floods) are also standard for the genre and this was only JUST introduced to the series... and even so it doesn't skip the dialogue cutscenes which make up 90% of the actual cutscenes. Further more there's no option to simply skip a cutscene there and then, it's either all cutscenes or no cutscenes. Anytime Gamefreak does something standard to the genre (difficulty settings or simple fucking SOUND settings) it's always has to be obtained through some stupid arbitrary way or the feature is outright shoddily made.

The only compelling reason to play later installments of this franchise is if you plan to go pro with VGC since there's some decent bank to be made there.
>discuss