I have no interest in getting involved in this general discussion, but looking specifically at this part; how is the size of a game like Pokemon at all relevant? Pokemon Sun & Moon is 3.2GB. Have they gotten several thousand times lazier?

There are some developers that could do more to optimize the size of their games, but in general game files continue to grow because the quality and number of assets they utilize has grown exponentially. Even Nintendo, when when faced with certain types of projects, aren't unable to overcome this. XCX, which benefits (file size wise) from being on a console that's limited in the quality of the assets it can render, is 23GB. That increases to 33GB when you include the loading patches. If it were a PS4/X1 title, with assets befitting those consoles, it'd be even larger.

Believe it or not, audio is one of the reasons games have such large file sizes. Uncompressed audio to be exact. And when you make a game that has a lot of audio in it, that size is gonna skyrocket. 

That much I knew. It's why Phillips CDi games sounded so much better than SNES and Genesis games in the early-to-mid 90s and are revered for their soundtracks, and why PlayStation games sounded so much better than their N64 counterparts (that and the N64 didn't have a dedicated sound chip). Star Fox 64 had a third of its card dedicated to just the audio. However,  audio is one of the smallest factors of a console's load, especially nowadays when consoles have dedicated hardware to output sound. Audio may take up a huge chunk of a game's file size, but loading it into memory is a cinch. Just because I said that I'm not going to pretend like I'm a technical wizard doesn't mean that I don't know anything at all.

not just Zelda, almost all of Nintendo main franchises have silent protagonists and silent NPCs. You think that's all just keeping with tradition?

Duh... You think Nintendo hasn't been capable of including full-on voice acting in its games? That's been a thing since Star Fox 64 20 years ago. How many in-house Nintendo games can you tell me have more dedicated voice acting than that?

And you really need to educate yourself on this whole matter before you start talking. 

Says the guy who thinks Nintendo games aren't capable of handling voice acting.

Square explicitly said that FF7 would have been impossible to make on the N64. All due to it using carts. Then Nintendo again went with a proprietary disc format for the GC which could store only 1.5GB of data as opposed to the 4.8GB on thr PS2. 

And where did I say anything about FF7 being possible on the N64? Now you're clearly strawmanning. I'm fully aware that FF7 was never going to happen for the N64, and I never blamed Squaresoft for that, or Konami for MGS, or any other dev/pub that had a vision that couldn't be realized on a cart. However, this was not the case for the GCN and PS2. The GCN was a technical marvel that could load compressed data and textures like nobody's business, and the 1.5GB disc limit was hardly a factor for the vast majority of games. When it became a factor, publishers simply put games on an extra disc that added very little to the overall price per unit. There were a variety of reasons why the GCN never got mainline FF games, but the technical aspects weren't one.

You and I have chatted here and the past, and you're now doing the same thing you did every other time: I acknowledged that I don't have complete knowledge or mastery of a subject, and you act like I don't know a damn thing at all. I only have myself to blame for thinking that you might have matured enough not to go back to your comfort zone.

Point is, with HD era (high rez textures, audio, maps...etc) game sizes has gotten bigger than ever. Games aren't just pushing 40-50GB today because devs are lazy. You can't just shave off 25-35GB of content and make it fit into a 16GB cart  and call it a day. And while data limits isn't the primary reason mainline FF games never came to Nintendo platforms since the SNES, it's one of the most imoortant ones. 

I meant to say earlier that the 16GB is the reported standard size for carts at launch.  Standard =/= maximum. That means that A) carts may come in bigger or smaller capacities, and B) The standard or max can increase over time. I believe the maximum file size for an N64 card was 4MB at launch; Super Mario 64 was around 2MB if I remember correctly. Resident Evil 2 launched on the N64 with a 64MB cart years later, as did Conker's Bad Fur Day. That's the nice thing about carts: you aren't locked into one permanent storage size.

Also, Skyrim SE comes in at 22.75GB on X1. You love taking unconfirmed reports as gospel, so with that logic, you know Skyrm SE is coming to the Switch. 22.75GB > 16GB, right? So hold up, how is this possible? A) Either the devs are able to compress the game down to 16GB and get it to run, or B) the game is shipping on a cart larger than 16GB. It looks like you are the one who is learning new things today.

http://wccftech.com/skyrim-special-edition-size-revealed/

And Nintendo keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. 

And since you admit you arrn't the most technical person out there I'll leave you with this. It's no coincidence that Nintendo games look the way they do. You call it charm but while they are charming just know they all look a certain way for a reason. Its not magic, Sony and MS don't invest so heavily in CPUs and GPUs because they are stupid. They do it to enable a certain level of technical freedom. And mind you, Sony are better engineers than Nintendo. The technical freedom afforded to devs by Sony and MS will just never be there on the Switch. This is not my assumption, it's a fact. You aren't going to make a 50GB game fit onto a 16GB cart without having g to butcher the game to all hell and back. Hell by the time you are done, it won't be the same game anymore. 

I think you've proven that you aren't the most technical person either. I'm not even going to reply to the majority of this parargraph, because the majority of it is either pure opinion or more strawmanning. "Sony are better engineers than Nintendo." Lol, based on what? The engineers do exactly what they are told to do, and that's what Sony and Nintendo engineers do. They weren't told, "Hey guys, go out there and make the most kickass box you can, and we'll go from there!" The rest, like I said, I'm not even going to bother with, because I can't take it seriously, and I realize that I'm already devolving into my silly DGAF mode, and we don't need that. I'll just put it like this: the only difference between you and me is that one of us can admit that he doesn't know shit about everything and can comfortably admit it.

Please point me to one post that asks for FF XV to be on the Wii U.

There are over 800 Pokémon now. 3.2GB is still not a lot for a game with that amount of content. My point is: you can make big games on small cartridges if the developers care enough. The first two generations of Pokémon were some of the biggest RPGs released at the time, despite being on the gameboy (which uses cartridges). I don't consider Final Fantasy VII to be bigger than those games tbh.

Obviously game files continue to grow as technology improves, that's not the point I'm trying to argue with. Games with 5 hours worth of content that take up over 100GB are pure laziness on the part of the developer in question. I can only think of how much the gaming industry has regressed by focusing on superficial things over gameplay. It's killed many franchises.

It's the strawman that everybody who doesn't agree with the OP runs back to. It's like their security blanket or something.

Look at Intrisic's latest reply to me. I said the PS2 Final Fantasy games would have worked on Gamecube just fine, and what does he do? Talk about how FF7 would have never worked on N64.

They had exclusivity deals with Sony, and the Gamecube was 5 millions against 20-22 millions on Japan.  20 Millions against 100+ millions worldwide.

Please point me to one post that asks for FF XV to be on the Wii U.