>>50954226two of these happen at the first two badges and the middle one is literally a gag about roadblocks
acting like the progression in pokemon has ever been anything but route -> gym -> route -> gym is an idiot
the only difference between gens 5-8 is that they're upfront about them being roadblocks, while gen 1-4 hid them using HMs. and guess what, people fucking hated HMs. they hated their progression being stopped because of an arbitrary move that you can't use without a gym badge because (???). and they hated having to carry HM slaves (upwards of 2 in some cases) just to progress and get items.
so gen 5 and 6 barely used the HMs, and made progression locked to roadblocks. gen 7 did away with HMs all together in favor of the poke rides. gen 8 (BDSP included) also did this. but the same formula existed.
and if your argument for "what's different between not being able to progress because you don't have an HM vs not being able to progress because of a physical roadblock" is """immersion""" than you need to question why your Pokemon needs an HM to do simple tasks like surfing or cutting a tree.
