>>49974078I feel the exact opposite. Whereas Gen 7 felt magical with that amazing pre-release period and the wonder of seeing what trials would be like or the concept of regional forms in general, Gen 6 is the one that has gotten criminally better with age and only makes the newer games seem that much worse.
Sun and Moon and the Ultra versions are the definitive games that are "good to think about but awful to play". In the original versions, trials were severely underbaked and ultimately offered less than even the most basic gyms did in Gen 6. Ultra SM fixes this by giving them more unique assets and adding one more to fix the number disparity between trials and gyms but ultimately it felt like they would have been better off with fully fleshed gyms and having the totems be optional side bosses.
That brings me to my other point, actual content. Gen 7 was just such a mechanical downgrade from 6 that it wasn't even funny. We went from having contests, secret bases, soaring around the region, the DexNav (and with it, basically fully integrated overworld encounters), an intuitive item finder, triple and rotation battles available in a battle facility, super training and reset bags, amie and its minigames, diving, and the ability to ride on your own Pokemon with different attributes depending on if you were using Sharpedo, Wailmer, Kyogre, or Lapras to having none of that.
That's ignoring the stuff that ORAS removed from XY that we already figured would come back, and from a pure gameplay perspective Kalos has dungeons to break the pace of the linear routes and plenty of optional routes that exist solely for backtracking back to Lumiose or other areas after you've gotten HMs. You can play XY two times and not experience it exactly the same way because of all of the technical stuff that was packed in despite the game itself being dogshit, but SM/USUM are the same every time. USUM didn't even add any new regional forms, as they were all just for LGPE to begin with anyway
