I think I’ll preface this by saying if the so called ‘leaks’ turn out to be misinformation, I’ll denounce my status as a Pokemon fan and live as a clown henceforth. 🤡
Hot take, but in light of recent events, I’ve been feeling kinda disappointed about the whole dexit situation. I know it’s still early to be passing judgement, but even at the expense of sounding like a broken record, I think it’s pretty disrespectful to remove from existence more than half of the current Pokemon. We’re talking about the next major core series games on a brand new console.
I’ve held off making comments about SwSh ever since the controversy started. To be honest, I was pretty annoyed by the overwhelming attention BBND people demanded and received when the fiasco first surfaced. But now, as the reality of the situation is setting in, I’m beginning to feel like I understand where they’re coming from.
I know I’m not the most vocal person on here, but as someone who’s been a Pokemon fan pretty much all her life, this has been a substantial blow to me personally if it turns out to be true. I’m one of those people, who actually has strong emotional attachments to previous gen Pokemon, I breed a set of old favourites and transfer them to the new game as early as I’m able to so they can journey with me in the new region, so I can see them in updated graphics (yes this matters to me). Pokemon for Switch was meant to be a revolutionary experience, we got the semi open-world and camera control we’ve wanted for so long, but it just had to have strings attached.
I’m not saying any of the new features are redundant or deserve to be massive targets of criticise. I think the graphics (that were so widely complained about), design of the characters and quite a few of the new Pokemon are all promising. Sure, not everyone’s a fan of dynamaxing and whatever, but we can live with that. I’m still very much looking forward to exploring the towns and wild areas which look gorgeous and as someone who didn’t play Let’s Go, I can’t wait to experience the ‘Pokemon roaming in the overworld’ mechanic. But it’s just sad that I’m faced with a reality where a brilliant camping minigame exists but I can’t play with my Rowlet. And I guess not all hope is lost for future DLC content or patches until they announce an official confirmation. I can learn to love new gimmicks and Pokemon, but it’ll be much more difficult to learn to get over what’s missing.
I still love Pokemon. I know the devs work hard, I’m not blaming any one person or company. Perhaps there are ways to improve the production process, for the fans to be better heard/represented. I don’t want to invalidate the next games, I still want to give them a chance and I know it will bring joy to lots of people. It’s just sad that for a lot of us, the experience will be discounted.
