>>58960679Yeah, all the best Pokemon games do this. Gen 1 let's you avoid all of the dogshit mid-game trainers, RSE let you avoid some of the tedious water routes and all the optional ones are way better than the mandatory ones, Gen 7's various little things at various stages of the game distract you from the next unskippable cut-scene for longer, and of course the BW example where you can skip a lot of it and have a fairly brisk game or play all of it and have a pretty substantial one. On the other hand, Gen 2's choice between two similarly leveled areas doesn't matter because you have to do both of them anyway and leads to you being overleveled until Blackthorn where you're about on par again and is the worst part of an otherwise great game, and XY are just a slog of nothing maps one after another with almost no breaks and when there are they're usually some degree of bad. Even the insanely tightly paced Chrono Trigger had some optional stuff over the course of the game and the requisite open end-game of many Square JRPGs of the era.
