>>46381729It was a long time coming, anon. And it happened years ago.
GF made one monster training game, it was coded like ass in true GF fashion, and became a big hit. Then they started work on another one which was also coded like ass, but Nintendo sent one of their programmers to fix their shit.
So suddenly GF can fit two games on a single cartridge, make cross-generation transfers possible, add a bunch of new mechanisms, so on. The whole concept of mainline is born, with copypasted story, gameplay, mechanisms, progression, you name it, for the sake of backwards compatibility.
Gen 3 rolls around and this time GF doesn't manage to implement cross-generational transfers, everyone's upset. They had one chance to axe the model of the mainline game and for some reason they don't. They don't remove a single monster from the game. They don't overhaul anything, just add extra mechanisms on top.
Gen 4 arrives, GF's only competent programmer leaves, they add backwards compatibility with the previous games, mainline still means exactly the same game as the first ones.
Gen 5 is the same.
Gen 6 is the same, except with one added battle mechanism.
Gen 7 is the same, except with one added battle mechanism.
Gen 8 is where their dev team just can't keep up with the backwards compatibility. They start removing monsters, moves, abilities, everything left and right. It's still 'mainline' in the sense that it's copypaste from the previous generations, but because GF doesn't have that one silver bullet programmer in the team they can't fit it all on the cartridge anymore.
And so, we'll end up where we should'be been since gen 2. The two new Sinnoh games both feature mainline mechanisms but will have limited pokedex' and most likely won't be compatible with each other or any previous or future games. If they introduce new pokemon they will not be transferable anywhere and are all likely to never appear in a game again. Mainline is dead. New pokemon games will also be new games now.
