I'm torn on this, because, yeah, PLA was not very good of a game, I'd give it a 7/10 at absolute best and that's being really really generous, however the vibe I'm getting from this article is "PLA was bad but I'd give SWSH a 10/10 and I already ordered 2 copies of SV", which fucking sucks.
Pokemon games are so, so far behind literally everything else coming out and it's not funny, if PLA is a 7, even some of the best Pokemon games are like 6's. I'm playing through Xenoblade 3 right now and time and time again I find myself blown away by the exploration, the vastness and scale of the world, the cities, the characters within, and the in world politics as this broken world tries to come together to survive, all while the game is also telling this great main story with characters fleshed out to hell, going so far as to have these totally optional questlines that get into the lives of these literal bit NPCs.
...Then I think about how a game like PLA had literally one town and it's world was the size of maybe 2 regions in XB3 with a fraction of the worldbuilding and a fraction of a fraction of the quests. It makes me fucking sad, since XB3 is gonna sell like maaaybe 2.5 million units while even absolute jokes of a game like BDSP are already pushing 17+ million.
How'd it end up like this, dude? Half the catalog right now is talking about how many Pokemon were cut from the game, the game itself looks like ass, the "best" improvements SV will make will still put it behind JRPGs that came out on the PS2...It's so fucked up,
I've been a Pokemon fan all my life and I remember being a kid and imagining how grand these games could be if they were ever on a console and not a handheld, and now here we are and the bar is just getting lower and lower and people are cheering for it. It breaks my heart, man. Pokemon can be so much more than what it is but no one seems to care enough to want it to happen.
