>>47418815I guess just a side point as to why XY feels a bit more lacking, that's why I brought up the sequels to those others.
I feel like for story, they established this really interesting concept about a war and AZ using that crazy machine to bring back Florges, but inadvertently killed tons of Pokemon. I do like that. I wish they would have gone into way more detail.
But it's true that all the Pokemon games kinda flirt with stuff like that. Cyrus mentions the gods of space and time, but we don't get more information beyond that. It's hard for me to say why, I need to think about it more, but I didn't care for the characters involved in the story. Maybe Cyrus felt more menacing to me than Lysandre.
I would disagree with poorly animated sprites. I actually really enjoyed the animated sprites in gen 5 and thought they added a lot of charm to the Pokemon. I think Vanillite lets out a little puff of snow which is cute. And there are other details like that in the sprites.
I don't think the trade off was all that successful. Pokemon like Charizard or Typhlosion lost a lot - and there's many more. They feel a little more sterile. The static sprites had a lot more personality going.
It's difficult to show that in 3D models sometimes, I understand. I know it's more work for them to have made every Pokemon up to that point in 3D and give them some animations, I think that's where a lot of the work for XY went, but the transition wasn't as smooth.
I need to go through each route in each region to really find the details as to why XY had more boring routes. I think they were more linear, less about exploration. Not that the older games had some more basic routes, but I feel like XY's map design was more linear. To prove that to you I'd have to get a bunch of the routes and maps and stuff to show images of.
