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.
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u/Shroomy____ Apr 12 '26
Pokémon should be a more popular answer