>>47616572Replaying them again recently, they felt like the first games that really aggressively stopped you in your tracks every five seconds in order to beat you over the head with character interactions.
There were still long stretches of exploration and battles but any time you were around other characters it was just nonstop talking. Definitely the start of a trend that makes SM and SWSH unbearable to replay.
The games are also fucking ugly. The overworld is pretty beautiful when its not doing shitty pixelated 3D effects, but the human sprites are these weird semi-chibi abominations, in-battle backgrounds are all just brown or green smudges, and the sprites would be fine if not for the awful tweening and how you're super-zoomed in on your own Pokemon's backsprite. The game is seriously hard to look it.
It does, however, have the best story in the series, some of the most enjoyable and inventive set pieces (the Plasma attack on the E4 is great), and the most consistently well-designed new Pokemon of any generation other than the original. Having an actual sequel instead of a third version was also really cool. It felt like this was the last generation in which they valued making a good product.
