>>58836610I was half shitposting just to ruffle feathers, but I do think the latter half of the Switch generation has some serious merit over the DS/3DS era that gets overlooked like crazy.
A huge chunk of the fanbase nowadays is too young to be aware, but DPPt marked the beginning of Pokemon's mechanical stagnation. It was, for all intents and purposes, just doing what RSE did, and RSE was ALREADY playing it very safe.
Gen 4 did very, very little to push the series forward, with its most important addition (online play) even being heavily limited, even for the time.
This is an oversimplification, but broadly speaking, you can look at the Nintendo handhelds as being akin to their hardware a gen behind -- GB/GBC to NES, GBA to SNES, and DS to N64 (an element Nintendo deliberately drew comparisons to). With that in mind, the respective Pokemon generations matched would-be scope (Gen 1/2 to NES, Gen 3 to SNES), up until DPPt.
At the time before release, the fanbase was expecting DPPt to be fully 3D, with battles somewhat resembling Pokemon Stadium. But again, DPPt just ended up being effectively a rehash of RSE... an effective formula, so it stayed fun, but lacking ambition.
This trend continued, with each subsequent gen being a step or 3 behind where it "should" have been, but people simply got used to it. Gen 5 was a lot closer to what Gen 4 "should" have been, 6 to where 5 was, and so on. Whats worse is, in doing so, parts of the series slowly got stripped away in the process.
In short, Pokemon has been an incredibly stagnant series, up to and including SwSh (the most stagnant and unmoving of them all).
PLA, SV, and PLZA have completely reversed this. While they have their own issues, each one of these games has actually sought to improve or move the series forward in some fashion. Some stumbled and looked like dogshit on the way, but I can't levy that "stagnant" criticism anymore. The franchise has changed, and rethought mechanics from the ground up.
