>>57476214One of the things that made Earl's Academy cool is that Earl was a minor yet memorable NPC from Gold and Silver. He actually makes you want to go to the Trainer School (the first and best one). He got full Sugimori art for Stadium 2, and was adapted in both anime and manga. Stadium 2 takes this small section from GS and fully fleshes it out, which is what the game did well. You have these generally minor named NPCs and now they have art. Earl, DJ Mary, Carrie, and Cal, in addition to practically every Trainer having art really brings Gold and Silver to life.
And then there was that classic N64 Pokémon weirdness that you can kinda see in the early anime where it just exudes cheeky personality. Champions is going to be missing so much of that energy, like how New Snap feels sterile and lame in comparison to the first Snap. That's just what modern Pokémon presents its image as.
A game of its scale is too much for Pokémon if it follows the Stadium 2 format. It's not going to have hundreds of NPC designs from throughout the series, or 50 tutorial battles with 6 Pokémon each from which you have to select 3, or head-to-head quiz modes, or 1000+ rental Pokémon, or game-specific formats (ie. let's do XY, no ORAS). Being on mobile already makes it really obvious it's going to be SaaS and drip-feeding content like GO, Masters, Pocket TCG, Unite, Café Mix, and everything else. I even question if it'll get a physical Switch release.
