>>56729008The fundamental idea of the pokemon world of gathering these creatures which exist basically as animals within the world, its the inherent appeal of the franchise. The franchise used to be more about trying to simulate this pokemon world within the game cartridge for people to sink hundreds of hours into, but this changed sometime during the 3DS era where they felt they should just make the games more disposable pocket sized JRPGs for kids to play and then move onto something else like mobile games after they were done.
Other JRPGs do not have this sense of building your own team of creatures like this, and the ones that do tend to miss the point in some way. SMT demons for example are not really comparable to pokemon outside of superficial things, you dont train them, you fuse them and basically turn them into completely new characters so you dont get that sense of bonding with a group of essentially pets. Other monster catching franchises have similar issues or again, laser focus on just the catching aspect that pokemon itself has let itself get more and more absorbed by at the expense of anything else.
As for the team question, yes, some things get rotated out, but not to a huge extent. I think the fact that almost everyone who played DPPt back in the day had a Luxray and Staraptor on their team speaks to a sorta shared experience in that regard. For me, team members that I'm not really feeling will get swapped out if I encounter some new pokemon that I think looks really cool, but I'm not catching everything I see just to horde a bunch of creatures in a box.
The main appeal of the franchise now is just sunk cost / coasting on goodwill, they stopped making the games I actually enjoyed to focus entirely on catching and online battles only, so its basically just a sense of "maybe next time they'll return to form!" that gets harder and harder to believe year after year.
