>>58284813I'm not against having any linearity, I just like having a degree of freedom between the major linear beats. Being entirely open world makes for a different kind of game experience, but I think Pokémon does best when it has Gyms in a specific order, but not in a hard-coded "It can only be done like this in this specific sequence of events" sort of way.
For example, I will always do Sprout Tower before Falkner. I think it's an interesting area early on in Johto, and you get some Trainer battles, a unique rival interaction, and an HM. You can also find wild Gastly if you go at night (useful defensively against Normal-type moves at this point), and you can grab a Bellsprout pretty quickly to trade for the guy's Onix which provides you an advantage against Falkner. What I like most about it is that it's your choice to take advantage of all these things. Your choice gives you an advantage going forward that a player who chooses to rush through the Gyms ASAP isn't going to have. When HGSS made Sprout Tower mandatory, it didn't change the way I played, it changed the way everyone else did so that we all had the same experience. Similarly, when I was a kid, it felt really cool to find Lugia in the Whirl Islands. It was the big mascot Pokémon, a Legendary, and I found it on my own. In HGSS, you're required to find the mascot before going to Kanto. Once again, it doesn't change how I play, but now everyone gets the same experience. Even HMs losing any sense of inconvenience means that players now get the benefits of having them without having to do anything. The further the series progressed, the more I felt like how I played stopped mattering and that everyone was getting the same participation trophies, much like what happened with event Pokémon.
