LogFAQs > #986431099

faramir77 posted...

It is a literal miracle that Pokemon has become the most successful media franchise in world history. The quality of the games has always been very questionable, although the GBA era was reasonably decent. I don't think there's a wider example of something that was such a great idea that was done so poorly and yet still was so successful as Pokemon.

From the absolutely broken mechanics of the first generation, combined with the missing content and extremely poor level progression of the second generation, along with the tedious map designs of the third and fourth generations, as well as the complete refusal to embrace decent online functionality in the fourth and fifth generations, and lastly the low development effort and gimmicky gameplay options of every generation since the sixth generation, Pokemon as a game franchise has been run in such a careless way (while still very much holding its appeal with its target audience).

Oh yeah I forgot about the more recent Pokemon games. I should add Arceus to this topic. They added a cool new real-time catching mechanic and then forgot to build an actual game around it. The open world is sparse and boring, the new "boss battles" play like a collection of the absolute worst bosses in the whole Souls franchise, and there are like four trainer battles in the entire game all of which are piss easy because your opponents only have a couple pokemon and they're all under leveled.

They're absolutely terrified to make a Pokemon game that has any real challenge to it even though the people who played and loved the first game are all now in their 30s, at minimum, and Arceus specifically plays like a proof of concept that they just shipped rather than build out. It sucked so bad I basically wrote off the entire franchise going forward, and from the reviews I read of the newer ones, I was probably right to do so.