The counterargument (to your point re staleness) is that games are art: innovation *should* be encouraged. You already have your old games and can always replay them. (A website is different because only one copy is ever accessible.) Warhol and Hitchcock and Avatar and Dickens and even fuckin Marvel don't stick to the same formula over and over — I find it disappointing that Pokemon does. (I support a female Bond film for the same reason. I'm sceptical, but I'd still like to see an attempt.)
Try looking at it this way:
Almost every book is just words on a page, describing events that happen. Where’s the innovation, right? Some books innovate, doing weird stuff with colored text or unusual typography or postmodern nonlinear narratives. How come most authors just stick to words on a page describing events that happen, and nobody’s decrying that for being stale?
Well, I’d say a great part of the reason is just that words on a page describing events that happen is a very tried and true format and there’s nothing wrong with it. Not everything needs to be innovating in every aspect of every thing. It’s very cool when some authors do, but not doing so is not a flaw in every other book that’s not doing that. People enjoy reading plain narrative books. It’s an established thing that works. The content of the words on the page is enough to make each book unique and worthwhile, and it’s not all that relevant to the vast majority of people that yeah, they’re all just words on a page.
Liking standard narrative books, and just wanting to read more standard narrative books, with no desire to branch out into avant-garde postmodernist literature, is obviously not the same thing as wanting to just read literally the same book over and over. Yeah, I can replay my old games - but I do want new Pokémon games with new stories and regions and Pokémon. I just care very little how much they innovate with the main gameplay and structure. I already like the main gameplay and structure just fine, just like I like narrative books just fine.
Yes, there should be video games that do wild new things with the format, invent new types of gameplay and do something totally different from anything you’ve seen before. I love playing cool innovative games! But I don’t really think that it’s a flaw in a given video game if it’s not doing that. And in particular, if there’s a game whose gameplay I just enjoy to bits - I am more than fine with a sequel to that game that's pretty much just the same thing but more of it, gameplay-wise. Heck yes, more of the thing that I like! Awesome!
But as I said, that’s a personal preference.
Look - Let’s Go was a shakeup of the gameplay formula, right? Innovation? Would you have wanted it to just be the next main series game, wild battles are never coming back, next time they might do something of the same caliber? Well, maybe you would. I know at least one person who would’ve liked that. But I know I would absolutely not. I think it’s cool we got something like Let’s Go, as a spin-off - but if Sword and Shield had not been a return to formula, it would’ve significantly damaged my interest in the series, because Let’s Go just does not scratch my Pokémon itch in quite the right way. Again, I really like the main series formula. Most significant deviations from it are going to be something I like less. By all means make more deviations, more different games for different sorts of people! Maybe they’ll even eventually make a kind of Pokémon game that I happen to like even more than the main series. But it hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not convinced it ever will.
Until then, I just want them to keep making the games that I really like.
