>Was it simply a product of its time before the internet completely took over?Yes. I and many others restarted our Pokemon game to check under the truck for Mew. I remember buying a magazine with links to Pokemon websites. I had to copy enormous links by hand like
website.com/jfiaiamwjfidoqojd7278228882jaja to get to some simple geocities style website with a few pokemon images and some text with news and rumours. It was a different time. I tried a lot of convoluted shit in the games, that I read on those shady websites. Only a few worked of course, glitch city, the mew glitch… the gen 2 cloning glitch and the missingno glitch spread around the school before I found them online. Wasted a lot of time on dead ends. But we didn’t have ADD, we were adventurous and wanted to go down the rabbit holes. Saw my 9 year old nephew playing Shield the other day, he just sprinted through the routes to the next cities, just going for the gym challenge and even avoiding trainers, he wasn’t underleveled because of exp share anyway. The world is different now. I don’t blame the kids, there’s a big barrier of 2 decades where a lot changed between us and them. They’re bombarded with so many stimuli and get used to the easy quick small dopamine releases so young, their brains are wired different than ours.
And it’s not like if he explored Galar thorougly there’f be a big payoff. We were unironically blessed with limited hardware that demanded we build the Pokemon world with our imagination.
