>>50412764>continued the death of PokemaniaPokemania was already over before RS was even known about overseas. Masuda outright said his main goal in making RS was to prove that "even if Pokemania was dead, Pokemon itself wasn't".
And Pokemon itself wasn't the sole culprit. In fact, the games barely had anything to do with Pokemania by Gen 2, the phenomena had moved entirely onto the anime, TCG and toys because not every household was willing to buy a Gameboy and copy of Pokemon.
Sure, there was a lot that factored into Late-Stage Pokemania's decline between the anime shitting the bed in Johto, movie oversaturation and that "magic spark" fading away with everything else since it'd been a few years already, but overall culture changing had a lot to do with it too.
Kids were growing up, Nintendo was still seen as "baby game" territory while the PS2 hit to extreme success, younger kids wanted to be like older kids who were getting into shit like Yu-Gi-Oh, Star Wars and Harry Potter so the younger kids ditched Pokemon to follow them, predominantly Christian households were very likely revoking Pokemon and other "satanic" media from their households in wake of all these "sinful" concepts, and all the dumb shit kids got into because of Pokemon resulting in localized bans at school certainly didn't help matters either.
You can't pinpoint the death of a cultural phenomenon on a singular cause without looking at the cultural times as a whole, and certainly not a facet of the franchise that wasn't as significant to the phenomenon as the marketing vehicles that preceded them in the first place.
