>>58314715I don't dislike him, but it's hard not to associate himself with the decrease in quality of the games from Gen VI and after.
On the one hand, I respect him and his ability to manage the franchise and oversee the development of multiple games simultaneously, going from RS to FRLG to DP and I do respect both his compositions and the old drive he once had to keep pushing the games to greater heights, he clearly had a certain vision for DP (that served as the foundation for some of the best games in the series and took it into the territory of Gods which fans had only theorized about or memed before) and BW's story, but on the other hand, it seemed that after BW he very much lost that vision.
Game Freak's failure to significantly and meaningfully staff up as the games went into the third dimension fully meant the games have essentially been dragging their feet for years, it took until 3 years ago to get models with fully modeled mouths and eyes and each game seems to be a beta test to lay the foundation for something to come, which itself becomes the foundation of something to come so nothing feels truly complete or realized (XY experimented with 3D which led to Let's Go experimenting with HD for SwSh which experimented with limited open areas for PLA which experimented with open worlds for SV).
And that's to say nothing of the sheer amount of content that gets cut leading to half baked releases like XY or base SM. To say nothing of the mindset GF had during Gen VI which implied they didn't feel like putting their all in these games in the face of the growing mobile games market, which laughs in the face of interviews during HGSS where Morimoto felt he'd gotten greedy with the sheer amount of shit he got to put in the games.
I don't hate Masuda, but it feels like he created this pessimistic environment for GF where doing the bare minimum with as few staff as possible is acceptable. And unfortunately, they were rewarded for doing so massively.
