I genuinely think Pokemon is the most cucked franchise of all time, suffering from success. It had every chance to be a genuine s tier rpg franchise but was turned down into watered down slop that does the same shit every time because of its insane popularity.

Satoshi Tajiri said "It's a manga closest to the world that I conveyed" in reference to the famously pretty dark and violent Pokemon Adventures manga and if you look at Gen 1 and Gen 2 its pretty obvious he's telling the truth.

Something like 7 trainers in Gen1 still have whips, Lavender town is insanely overdone but the theme and happenings there are genuinely pretty creepy, the whole pokemon war stuff with lt surge, team rocket cutting off slowpoke tails, or killing the Marowak. The tone of Pokémon was equivalent to typical darker end kids manga and anime from the 90s. It's only by gen 3 they decided to completely sterilize the world and turn Pokémon from a genuine rpg franchise into just ''Pokémon'' aka the same game copypasted over and over again

This can also be seen in the direction of the Pokémon anime and the first movie, the anime was supposed to actually end for one with a Pokémon revolution, a concept which was softened and recycled for gen 5, the tone of the first movie as well especially at the start is pretty grim as well.

If Pokémon was a moderate success rather than a blockbuster it would of blossomed into an awesome franchise, we would of seen the gameplay and world change massively rather than be the same shit over and over again, we would of had that kind of sober and fairly serious atmosphere of a real lived in world just like Tajiri envisioned.

As it is Pokemon just rides on the fact it had one of the greatest concepts for a video game ever and will never get interesting again despite the developers clearly wanting it early on, just look at all the saucy folklore they wrote for gen 4 that barely made it in, that was in the vein of gen 1/2 atmosphere and it just wasn't allowed.