>>56154033It's crazy to think about. Pokémon was always designed with a social aspect in mind, Tajiri imagined bugs crawling along a link cable between two Game Boys, and his Capsule Monsters pitch heavily emphasizes trading and information sharing. But when you read interviews and look at the Gen I decompilation, you see that multiplayer battling, AKA the entire competitive scene, was a last-minute addition at the behest of Nintendo. While it seems like an obvious inclusion, Tajiri clearly had no intention of starting a competitive scene, and the multiplayer itself was wildly unbalanced because Pokémon to him was first and foremost a single-player RPG experience that encouraged communication between kids. Compare this to nowadays when there's a growing opinion among modern Pokémon fans that the single-player is irrelevant and doesn't need to be good, only competitive matters, and it's used to excuse the many faults the modern games have with their single-player experience.
The Pokémon that was a single-player RPG has steadily become more incompatible with the modern demographic that's only drawn to it for its social elements, or because they're super autistic. Either way, they won't demand anything better.
