>>48631265>Being an actual gameOh yeah it is an actual game alright. Just a really really shitty one
>By reskinning Alola's gyms at the last minute?Yes, by cleverly integrating the culture of Alola into the gym challenge, and giving us soulful battles against actual Pokémon and not just characters you can sweep in less then 5 minutes. Helps that totems actually have strategies and the fact that they call allies and have great movesets alone makes them more challenging, memorable and fun than gyms, especially past Gen 5 where at least the gym leaders were interesting. XY shat the bed with that, so no one even remembers most of the characters or battles except for in hilariously bad cases like the 8th gym leader Wulfric being having 3 Pokémon with less than 4 moves, Korrina's entire team being resisted by Honedge etc. And some aren't even memorable for that
>Sure, bud. The only thing Gen 7 "shook up" was starting the trend of obligatory regional gimmicks that exist solely to get dropped next game. You're not helping your case.Love how you tried to word it so that mega evolution couldn't be mentioned but no matter how much you try to cope with it, megas are gimmicks even if not regional. They have the exact same template that was followed by Z moves and eventually dynamax. And I'm sure I don't need to remind you how XY were the games that introduced it, and the feature has essentially been dropped since ORAS as we haven't had any new addition to it in nearly 6 years? But go on and do your mental gymnastics.
>XY were meh at best but it was still Pokemon. NatDex and all.It was Pokémon but bad. And natdex was still technically in the games untill SWSH
