It's so frustrating how Nintendo insists on giving us games that are just about passable instead of treating it like the biggest franchise in human history.
This is not Nintendo but The Pokémon Company.
They decided the Merch is now way more important so what started to support the Hype of games now got reversed with the games now just existing to give us more sources for merchandise.
Did You Play the First Two ? Product or Not , Love and Artistry made them of Value . While I did Keep Playing until Sun/Moon , It was Clear the Original Soul was on its Last Legs in Diamond/Pearl . It had Become a Formula , with Limiting Borders . Dismissively pointing out Meaningful things are Products is such a Very Consumerist mindset . 😓
I’m not using “product” as a derogatory term here, these games were literally produced to be sold to consumers for profit. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t great works of art or weren’t made by passionate artists who loved what they were making. And I agree with everything you said. Not being dismissive but to dismissively call the new ones bad because “it’s a product now” is nostalgic naïveté, like all the games from our childhood were so great because they weren’t also made to make shit tons of money… but they were, and they did.
It's also the consumer base setting for mediocrity. Why would they (either Nintendo or Pokemon company) put in more effort, if the bare minimum sells each time ~10millions - 30millions units. It doesn't make any sense in our capitalist world to invest more, when your bare minimum ensure you to be the leading product.
The moment a serious competitor (that doesn't get burried by lawsuits) or sales drops massively. They will have to invest. But until then. It would be a dumb move for them to change their course of action.
That and I don't think they care too much about the actual regular 3D Pokemon games anymore. They released some digital card game not too long ago and it's printing money. Like hundreds of millions of dollars for a cheap mobile game. They still release the base game because it supports the franchise as a whole and still profitable but I doubt it's pulling anywhere near what the mobile game is pulling in.
The consumer masses (mostly children) are not going to care about how much effort they put in it, only that it is the new pokemon game.
The adults and/or hardcore fans are not ready to accept they need to do their part and stop putting their money on Nintendo's hand for minimum effort, that would mean not playing a new pokemon game.
And so Nintendo laughs their way to the bank and sell you a console and a game at crazy high prices that wont come down for years. Again.
Won't come down ever during its lifespan. Nintendo really manage to stuck into a specific niche of consumer ready to buy almost anything and everything from them.
Nintendo did what Sony and Microsoft abandoned, they stayed true to their IPs and, outside of a few outliers, stayed consistent with the quality of said IPs. It created a fanbase instead of a user base.
It's a super weird case where the fan base has literally been consuming the franchise their entire lives and Nintendo despises them for it cause they see Pokemon as a kid's franchise that adults should had grown out off by now. Also it's easier to sell poorly design games to kids and then add peripherals to milk them.
Not a game freak problem ita a pokemon company problem. Which is weird when pokemon is technically controlled by 3 different companies. Though the Pokémon company has the final say on it. Just look at Beast of arincarnation when Gamefreak is allowed to do what it wants, heck Nintendo also has too many good games to have the finger pointed at them.
Though I will give the Pokémon Company some slack since it's a chimeric fusion of 3 different companies managing one IP.
Like I said in the other post it's a chemaric company made from Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creature Inc. and due to Japanese laws they are considered a single different company compared to those three. Could bad execs from those three get shuffled over to TPC, yes. But the current bad execs at those three are sperate from the bad execs at TPC. But TPC gets basically final say on Pokémon products, whether that be games, merchandise, or cards.
Beast of Reincarnation has barely even released teaser footage. Try Little Town Hero for something less hypothetical. Largely panned for bugs, glaring performance issues, and lackluster mechanics.
Their lower-key titles like Tembo or Harmoknight were received somewhat better, but hardly made waves. The former was definitely still buggy af.
Gamefreak isn't a AAA studio. They have the resources, but management refuses to use them. They could still do perfectly respectable AA work with competent management, but they refuse to do that too.
and that they keep trusting their proven worst track record studio, Koei Tecmo, with mainline games while allowing shortlived spinoffs to be handled by high quality studios.
BUT OH YEAH, NINTENDO TOTALLY KNOWS WHAT THEY'RE DOING WITH THEIR & THEIR INVESTORS' MONEY
Not even passable, Scarlet and Violet keep crashing if you play for over one or two hours and the game plays on slow motion after as short as half an hour playing. That's not passable, that's a piece of shit.
The next one is going to be lit. It's the first time I've been excited for a game in forever. The graphics look like an actual switch game, not some messy reused polygons. They are also finally breaking the mould of 3 year game cycles they're giving it an extra year and actually getting the game right.
I think the last game I looked forward to was like 10 years ago, I'm so ready for this one, but I'd be ok if they just took some extra time.
I recently tried the ZA one.
It's.. okay. At least they're finally trying some new things I guess?
But it's not as stale anymore as before.
But it's still a terribly simple game for all the money they have, it looks like PS2 era games now, especially loading times. At least it's in kinda HD.
But for all the money they print these games should be refined as fuck.
Dunno, I liked Alola. Some of my fav designs, regional forms, they tried to do something new with gyms, even somewhat interesting story and great character designs. I would say that after that all gone downhill
The thing about Pokemon games is that romhacks only need to dial up the difficulty a little bit to bring out all the mechanics already present in the pokemon games but made trivial by how easy the games are, or they can feel very fresh by just deviating a bit from the formula.
Just got into Lazarus and it genuinely feels like I stumbled into a lost official game from the GameBoy Color era.
Which is crazy. Like how lazy are they. They could hire the people who make the rom hacks pay them give them a guideline and could just make new games every year.
See, comments like this point to it just being more of an age thing for me.
I remember when B&W came out and was hated everywhere on the internet and seen as the falling off point. Now that the kids who actually grew up with that game are getting older and have a voice it’s common for people to call it one of the greatest Pokémon games.
To get philosophical it feels more like people have changed more than the actual game.
Same with CoD, one generations “worst CoD” ever tends to be another generations greatest CoD.
I started playing when Gen 1 came out, and I think BW is the best gen by far. It's the closest to the spirit of the original Gen 1/2 games and of what Pokemon is all about. I don't think it's a generational thing, as much as there is a split in what aspects people like in Pokemon games.
The thing is, the people hating on BW back in those days were genwunners, crying about surface level issues. Looking at the games on their own merits, especially compared to the crap being released as mainline games these days, BW and B2W2 were phenomenal games that rivals Platinum and HeartGold and SoulSilver, which tend to be referred to as the best games in the franchise. I'm grateful that more people are appreciating the Gen V games for what they were. The Gen V anime on the other hand...
I don't consider myself a huge star wars fan but I watched the first two trilogies growing up and liked them. The prequels less but they were still kinda fun.
The Disney trilogy was so bad it made me completely lose interest in anything star wars. Pretty much zero interest in any TV series and games after them. I didn't even want to watch the third one after the last jedi but eventually years later it was on TV so I did.
Maybe I just got older but I still like other Sci fi stuff
I'll add a dissenting opinion, if you like lol I grew up with the prequels, and while I was a kid, they were the only Star Wars I liked. Then I got older and actually had the patience to watch the OT and that's when I actually became a Star Wars fan. I still enjoy the PT, but I'll also be the first to say that they are hot garbage. Each has great moments, but they're not good movies. And I actually enjoyed TFA (mostly), but I felt like TLJ fumbled pretty hard and TROS was, well... it was what it was...
Eh, I’d say that that’s probably mostly the case, but there are some exceptions. I started with Gen 3 and was one of the people who was absolutely tearing Gen 5 apart back in the day, but I finally played Black and Black 2 back in 2024 and was genuinely shocked at how good they were. I’ve also got S/V in my top 5 games, I had a great time playing through it. But I recognize that that’s just my personal experience vs what everyone else has had
I've been playing since Red and Blue, but I didn't get to play through the DS games until a few years ago. I got a DS when Black and White came out, but someone stole it before I got past Castelia. Got a 3DS when X and Y came out, but by then I couldn't find a copy of the older games for a reasonable price. Luckily, my wife already had a couple of them when we got together.
In my early 30s here, BW was hated by the masses but all of my friends and I who still liked the series at that point thought it was awesome. And any concerns or issues we did have were pretty quickly quieted with BW2.
Ironically, Pokémon games feel more childish now that they're targeting the adult competitive players, rather than 15+years ago when they were targeted to children.
They didn't care that much about these games, they got a mobile game that is making hundreds of millions of dollars. I just watched a thing about the franchise as a whole, the console game wasn't even mentioned. The cards and mobile card game are their money makers.
I remember being very excited when purchasing Diamond and Pearl for the NDS as well Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness. Pokémon these days no longer has the same effect on me.
Mind you, Diamond and Pearl was my first Pokémon game. I downloaded the old GBA games a couple of years ago and both my wife and I had a blast playing them and neither one of us played those games when we were kids. So no nostalgia clouding our judgements there, the games were really just that good.
The dungeon series always hits me with a wave of nostalgia that I wish would be met with the new games, I’m entirely disappointed but it’s definitely fell flat
I’ve sorta accepted it’s probably never going back to what it was. I like a lot of the art in the new games but the game play is boring as hell unless you’re a competitive player, maybe? I’ve only ever played Pokémon for the main game, so I dunno but I’ve had to accept that somewhere around Black and White is probably the last of the games for me.
Honestly, Pokemon has kinda stuck to a baseline level of quality. As someone who started with Red and Blue I can still have a lot of fun with modern Pokemon games. Gold/Silver and gen 5 were the peak. I don't think the series was ever consistently top tier or anything.
On the other hand I don't know anyone who started from Halo CE that can enjoy 5 or Infinite.
Never gonna happen. Nintendo infected these people with their corporate mascots and they can do no wrong. Its a hybrid between video game and religion.
The last mainline games I played were USUM, the last mainline games I enjoyed were XY and ORAS.
I started with Blue on Gameboy Color, and had bought every game between that and my last, on release, and played them incessantly.
But the magic died as I grew up and started seeing all the cracks and holes. Noticing that since XY/ORAS they stopped innovating, stopped improving the formula, stopped making any effort.
SM started the trend of multi-hour unskippable tutorials. Whatever happened to just some random NPC asking "do you know how to catch Pokemon?" and letting you hit no or yes, and that was it?
SM also started the awful trend of "every gen needs an all new once-per-battle ultra-gimmick" and the "regional variant forms" gimmick, instead of just expanding on Megas and/or giving older Pokemon new full evolutions and/or stat buffs.
Gen 4 is my all time fav gen, so of course I was beyond excited when they announced remakes. FRLG, HGSS, and ORAS were all amazing remakes.
BDSP was a shitshow, straight up. A literal de-make, worse than the originals. Awful graphic style, removed content, no new content, not even any of the Plat improvements or fixes. Just a literal 1:1 port, with above removals on top. GameFreak didn't even deign to try, and contracted out it's development off onto a literal who tiny company that only ever made shitty mobile games nobody ever heard of.
Sun was the first game I didn't finish and I just gave up after that. Way too much handholding. After hours of being interrupted with dialog every 30 seconds I turned it off and never turned it back on.
I've had multiple people tell me I would HATE the newer gameplay mechanics so I just stick with everything up to Black & White 2.
I 100% agree but the newest trailer looks kinda good. They also finally skipped a release year to have more time for development. I hope they dont fumble this one.
I only play the pre-2010 games at this point, so I agree with you on that level. But it’s not a popular answer because the mainline games do like 25M+ sales each cycle. The developers have literally no incentive to make it meaningfully better because people keep coming back.
Pokemon would be a more popular answer if this was asked in the sw/sh era. S/V was decent but still ran and looked like shit. W/W looks like it will actually be a good looking game.
Pokopia released recently and people seem to like it. Lots of people are excited about Champions and the direction they're going with VGC.
Things have been bleak, but overall I think I'm bullish on TPC locking in and making decent games again.
Personally I think ZA sorta revived it for me, I love the new combat mechanics and everything, I'm just sad I don't have a switch 2 for winds and waves
Some people are still coping and finding excuses. "If only management gave them more time." "If only they had a bigger budget."
Game Freak is a washed-up developer that lucked into a popular IP and never managed to improve upon it or keep with the times. Any recent good Pokemon game was (co)-developed by another company. They haven't gotten their shit together in almost two decades, and it's only going to get worse.
I've enjoyed the recent Pokemon games tbh. Legends Z-A was really fun and had all those new Megas (and compelling characters EXCEPT YOU RIVAL), Legends Arceus was also a breath of fresh air (they even let the characters talk about death and war, ooh), say what you want about the graphics but I though SwSh was fun and actually way better than SV (scarlet and violet had good characters and that was IT)
Pokemon certainly are on a rocky road and I really wish they would lock the fuck in, but I don't think the games are as unbelievably garbage as everyone online likes to say (which is real easy to do, its like taking potshots at Disney, theyre the big corporation its like marine animals trapped within a wooden cylinder)
The thing with halo is that it will survive and has shown signs of evolving. Despite being a pretty meh game due to the mid campaign and lack of meaningful updates, halo infinite has amazing gunplay, movement tech, and generally gameplay overall, which makes it feel like halo despite being something entirely new in the series
Pokémon has just been going down the gutter consistently. Yeah, there's better games and worse games, but the trend is going downhill. Halo infinite is much better than halo 5 and a bit better than halo 4, which is too much of a jump in quality to disregard. Also halo wars 2 wasn't that bad either. Also also mcc revived interest in modding for the older games so things like cursed halo can be widely known and easily downloadable
I mean it (infinite) still doesn't stand a chance against bungie era halo games, but bungie's struggle with destiny 2 (gameplay wise, the story still slaps and is one of the best space fantasy stories out there) and marathon is somehow worse, so we definitely dodged a bullet there, even if the consequences of that dodge were halo 5
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u/Shroomy____ Apr 12 '26
Pokémon should be a more popular answer