>>57484448RS were a grift. They get by on hitting familiar Kanto beats as a test to see if the fans would still buy Pokemon a third time if it's safe and familiar without trying to continue the plotline directly because that would've required work to justify why there was suddenly more new Pokemon. Emerald doesn't fix anything, it just merges the two in a pretty haphazard way. Honestly I think Emerald has worse pacing
DP is a more polished version of RS' story but still lacks a little. Platinum meanwhile is a major improvement by adding a few new characters and details to the plot which justify a lot of the previously unfocused world building and actually fixes issues with the game's story. There's a reason most Sinnohfags swear up and down that it's one of the best games and it feels like the culmination of about 6 years of trying to do the same thing over and over. Looker, Charon and Cyrus' Grandpa actually do help a lot in fleshing out Team Galactic and Pokemon's general worldbuilding, and Cyrus gets actually good closure for a villain thanks to the Distortion World if people weren't just mashing the A/B Button to skip dialogue
XY meanwhile were clearly ambitious games trying to do something, but its rewrites from AZ being the main antagonist to Lysandre genuinely fumble a lot of the stuff the game was building towards and attempts to make a literally who into a sympathetic antihero that makes the ending come across more as a gag than a tearjerker it was supposed to be. A Z version could have polished the story to make it more coherent what the hell was going on, but I don't think it could fix the Flare Admins or the Friends because there's just too fucking many of them. Too many characters sharing screen time in such a short game means nobody gets development. Meanwhile a genuinely important character like Malva gets zero screen time unless you check the Holo-Caster frequently, which isn't a personality it's a job
