I agree very much with the last 4 posts but I gotta say, people keep acting like the backlash to gen 5 is responsible for the current direction of Pokemon. It’s downright wrong and it’s so obvious.
Whatever you think of gen 5, they sure aren’t going back to what made gen 4 loved and that was extremely loved at the time Platinum and HGSS came out (DP not so much, you might not remember but the speed got tons of backlash, people were happy with Plat tho). Gen 5 also did not sell poorly because of backlash and the backlash it recieved at the time has been overblown, people act as if it were universally blasted which isn’t the case aside from arguments over the designs. Gen 5 sold poorly because people were waiting for a 3DS entry and had moved past the DS.
If the changes to the series were about backlash then they would have gone back to what worked, aside from nostalgia pandering. It was just about cutting cost. The changes to the series were inevitable.
Also, almost everything people like to blame the 3ds games for from intrusive story to lack of postgame are actually rooted in gen 5 but I think I’ve already said that. The only things that really fall on the 3DS games are the nostalgia pandering and gen 7 wasn’t even bad about it + lame animations, granted (though still overblown and has some toxic debate around it, people tend to ignore the animations that are good and act like Stadium/Colo animations and the games themselves were all amazing which is totally wrong).
