Always serious, 'cause someone has to be
There was an entry in the Gen VII games folder:
- Sword and Shield came under heavy fire for making any Pokemon not part of the regional Dex incompatible with the game. #BringBackNationalDex became a popular hashtag to decry Game Freak's choices, yet Gen VII was in fact the first to not include a National Dex since its introduction in Gen III. The key difference is that Pokemon not native to Alola could still be freely traded and transferred.
The thing is, Sun & Moon only came out 4 years ago. That feels too early for sin-making to me. Is there an official time on when a game can make sins or is it all just played by ear?
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The exact time is not important. What matters is that something that was earlier seen at most as a nitpick became more of an issue later.
Edited by KOman ¿?¡!
I'm not particularly convinced it really matters either way because this deals with the *name* of the criticism rather than the actual criticism itself (indeed, during the initial firestorm, fans were quick to remind protesters that SM already excluded a visual National Pokedex).
Not sure where to put this, but I have issues with the tutorials entry in the Gen 3 section and the postgame entry in the Gen 6 section.
For the first, it literally just reads "FRLG was the first game to have tutorials, and later games did the same thing". A problem simply existing and being repeated later on is not this trope. The entry neglects to explain why FRLG's tutorials were accepted or ignored back then. I was going to modify the entry myself to fix it but, perhaps because I'm biased and I never really understood this critique, I couldn't think of anything other than "It's a Gen 1 remake", which doesn't even seem to be the reason people glossed over it. Though perhaps that point could be applied in a roundabout way to Let's Go! and say "Let's Go! was a much more explicitly entry level game, but Sword and Shield were promised to cater to serious problems". But even that has issues as it speaks of a very recent entry in the series and doesn't encompass every game this criticism is held against. Maybe it could be reworded into a point in the general games section or the generation 1 section, though again I struggle to rationalize it (yeah I know I should get better at playing devil's advocate).
For the second, I see two different ways to interpret it: later games accentuated the problems with XY and XY marked the start of barren postgames becoming a big topic. Now the first interpretation is not Franchise Original Sin at all: if the issue was a big deal even back then, the flaw was already out of hand: it didn't become that way, and it's not like later games caused that to significantly stick out. And that leads into why I don't think the second interpretation doesn't work either: XY being the first game in a conga line to not have expansive postgames doesn't make it original sin, especially when it does nothing to counteract it. Perhaps there is a third way in how the small postgame of XY was excused for one game in generation 6 but not the second, especially when it was a remake. However, that also doesn't feel appropriate, not just because it supposedly came to a head only one game later, but because, at least from how this is worded, ORAS' lack of content in relation to HGSS has nothing to do with XY. And even then, HGSS pulled all that shit from Platinum, and if that's the problem, it seems more Tough Act to Follow rather than Franchise Original Sin (the second region example was removed from this page for the same reason). Besides, proper entries about remakes not changing much and postgames being barren are already covered in previous sections.
Anyway, that's all from me.
Should the point about streamlining be split up into two sections? One point talks about the mechanics, another can talk about the experience.
Generation 2 games, even their remakes, have a lower level curve than other Pokémon games and were arguably very very easy beforehand.