>>47674760No? That would still be Emerald and the DS era in the majority of people's eyes. Sword and Shield did add a fair bit of quality of life, but without the backlash it would have just sold a little bit more and been otherwise treated fairly neutral.
Game still has a weird thing with levels where if you do the main content of content of it (fucking around in the wild area) you shit on the story even harder than normal. Exploration is even more barebones since they clearly focused on the "plains of various elevation) area. The plot is atrocious even for a Pokemon game since it basically doesn't exist until Wyndon where Rose shits and cums over fixing the energy crisis early and nearly gets a stadium of people killed by a space skeleton (seriously, we could have just focused on the league and made the legends entirely post game content with Sonia's investigation being solely optional run ins until then). Game again hedges all its bets on the wild area, so outside of really small side quests you basically have nothing but raid shenanigans (which are also jokes outside of special events and the DLC meme cave) and a lamer battle tower to do (not saying Contests and Pokeathalon were BIG CONTENT, but it was dumb shit to get mindlessly invested in after the main story if you weren't feeling like going online at the time.)
Now, the DLC kind of remedies some of the issues I and others have with the base game, but it's DLC. I drop money on Smash and I get the dumb fun of playing as Minecraft Steve in an already fuck huge roster. I drop money in Splatoon 2 and I get an alternate single player campaign in a largely multiplayer game that tests how well you can adapt to parts of the game you overlook. I drop money on Sword and Shield and I get... some QoL NPCs that could have been in the base game? The ability to catch off-region Pokemon which was in other games through specific parts of the region as well as features like swarms?
