>>58940183>Gamefreak doesn't decide what is considered a mainline title because no individual entity can decide that, and no author can control that.Are you fucking retarded? Being the AUTHOR of the product, they quite literally have AUTHORity over it, and therefore have the authority to decide what is mainline and what is not. If they consider Legends to be mainline (which they obviously do), then they developed Legends with the intention that it is mainline. Therefore, Legends is mainline.
The only possible way their authority on mainline status could be challenged would be if there was popular consensus to the contrary, which there obviously isn't because people have been arguing about this for more than four years.
>2 games that stray from the formula are objectively spinoffs and not mainline titlesSo Zelda Breath of the Wild is a spinoff, then? It strays much farther from the established Zelda formula than Legends strays from the Pokemon formula. What about Super Mario 64? That must be a spinoff, too, because it has a completely different formula from the older Mario games! This argument is retarded because every single long-running video game franchise has had changes made to its formula over time, experimented with different mechanics, dropped certain ones and brought old ones back, and so on.
Your headcanon is meaningless, your childhood franchise won't stay the same forever, and you have no control over what is and isn't mainline, especially when the creators of the series have said Legends is mainline multiple times and you continue to ignore them.
