>>58939101>>58939142Critical reviews aren't really reflective of the general audience. SWSH got a bunch of 8 and 9s too. The actual ground level discourse around SM was much more divided. Not as negative as SWSH or SV, but nowhere near unanimously positive either. I remember a lot of complaints about the amount of dialogue and cutscenes back then, among other things.
If anything, I actually think the perception of them is a little more positive now than it used to be. There's been a wave of nostalgia for them recently and the people who were kids when they came out and played them as their first Pokemon games have grown up and joined the conversation, while simultaneously a lot of older, disenfranchised fans have been dropping out of the franchise.
I think if you said SM were your favourite Pokemon games in 2018 you would most likely be laughed at, but these days it's not that uncommon of an opinion. And I feel like I get a lot more pushback when I criticize them than I used to. Of course, time taints memory, and maybe I'm only remembering the conversations from back then that I want to. I'm not about to go trawl through the /vp/ archives to back myself up, I don't care that much. But that goes both ways. A couple reviews don't really mean that much in the grand scheme of things.
