I have always loved the designs of most of the Pokémon, but I have always hated the setting in the game.

>dull world with nothing out of the ordinary in terms of geography or points of interest
>bland human characters that exist to introduce Pokemon in all mediums.
In both the games and anime the humans had the personality of cardboard, both manga bumped them up but still.
>interesting creatures went from both fauna and sapient creatures, to just fauna for the most part.
In gen 1 media Pokemon speech was uncommon but not that baffling; better than one off boring NPCs wasting an episode to introduce said Pokémon.

I ultimately had to give up on the main series due to this. Mystery dungeon was far superior to any other games storyline wise and setting wise though, honestly I wished the franchise was based in this verse instead from the start.

>inb4 furry
shut up zoomer, there were many more shows with monsters and freaks as the main cast in the 90's than there are now.