I feel no desire to play these.

Call me old fashioned if you must but the thing I've always valued most about pokemon games, ever since my first, red, on the game boy, was being able to catch em all.

Now, before you get on my case, I know we were never actually able to catch em all. From the very beginning, even if you owned both versions and two game boys, your hard limit was 150 out of 151 (barring cheating / glitching), and that didn't change until the very first event distribution. But the fact that every single pokemon that existed was at least programmed into the game -- more importantly, the fact that no one told us they weren't (admittedly if they had they would've been lying, but that's beside the point) -- at least made the games feel immersive and gave an impression of indefinite replay value. Even if we knew not every mon was obtainable in one game, we also at least knew they were all there, they were all present in the virtual world. They all "existed." And that alone, as long as we suspended our disbelief and put ourselves in the shoes of the MC, was enough to keep us playing and searching, enough to keep the world of the game feeling like an actual world and not just a cage. Serendipitously enough, the old man glitch, the trainer fly glitch, and co., actually contributed to this impression; even if we could find all 151, there were always other things out there, alien things that were not meant to be.

Fast forward to Sw/Sh. I can tolerate 'mons being unobtainable, but in these games, there are tons of 'mons present in the fictional canon that don't even *exist* in the virtual world presented to us, Nintendo *tells us this outright*, and we're *still* expected to suspend our disbelief and pretend like these missing species are somewhere out there just because the canon tells us so. I'm sorry, but that's too tall an order for me. This game series has lost its defining soul.