Buy the Pal World people. Simple. Effective. Inexpensive.

And while you're at it, buy Balatro if you're tired of Assassin's Creed. Both games feature decks of cards, so they're practically the same. This suggestion totally checks out.

Nintendo just needs to step in with that old Nintendo Seal of Quality. Meaning Nintendo needs to be looking over Game Freak's shoulder and point out when stuff isn't good enough. And it's possible that Game Freak just needs to hire better people. They spent must of the life of Pokemon making 2D games and low fidelity portable 3D games, then they had to step up to a much more powerful system with the Switch and they failed to do it justice.

That and longer development cycle as that jump in power means dev time should be longer. If A-Z comes out this year and next pokemon gen doesn't come out until holiday 2026 that'll be a huge step in the right direction. They definitely need to move to a four year mainline release cycle instead of 3 years. They should be doing one mainline game every four years with one side game (like Legends) or remake every four years, so one pokemon game every other year.

Honestly I just want a harder and more interesting game. Sw/Sh was decent but just wasn't terribly interesting or challenging. I can't get much out of a game if it isn't challenging so while I enjoyed Sw I was kinda just going through the motions because even the gym battles just had very little difficulty. It was my first pokemon since the original Red I played back in like 1999, and Red on GB was much more fun and challenging than Sw/Sh on Switch.

The fact that the graphics are middle of the road doesn't bother me the way they do some people, though a prettier game would always be nicer. I'll happily take a continued graphically mediocre Pokemon if they just make the gameplay and challenge top notch. I've only played a little bit into Arceus (still meaning to go back to it and play through it) but it seemed a good bit better than Sw/Sh and a big step in the right direction, but then I guess V/S was a buggy mess, though if they had just spent an extra 6-12 months getting V/S shippable maybe it would have blown people away as it seems like the game was good but just clearly released in an unfinished state.

I guess the annual Pokemon Direct or whatever will be in the next couple weeks right? I'm looking for them to show off Legends A-Z and have nothing at all to say about the next mainline game because that's holiday 2026. So that'll be the big first test to see if they are serious about making the series better - giving themselves longer development cycles.

Sword and Shield was formulaic.

I hadn't played a Pokemon game before that since red/blue and not much of the usual tropes had actually changed in several decades.
Scarlett/Violet was the first game in many years I physically returned to the store as it was unplayable in my opinion.

Hopefully Gamefreak gets it right next time around and I definitely will give them another chance, but definitely being cautiously optimistic this time. No pre-order.

I think I'll gloss over the "lazy devs" rethorics and how some are making the making up of games to be an easy affair, especially for a series that has recently shifted it's focused on an actual Open world structure.

The last entry was hugely flawed in the technical department and this was mostly due to their lack of hardware expertise and because the alloted time to make a game of this type in 3 years is ridiculously low for what should be most likely at least a 4 year dev cycle.

Hopefully, the next hardware gives them the necessary leeway to make a game closer to their actual aspirations and those of fans.
Not expecting the moon since these games are obviously done with more limitations than people seem to imagine.

They've got a new structure down, let's see if/how they can refine it !

Gamesfreak is a classic example of a business that doesn't move ahead with the times and one day it will bite them in the arse.

Not unless Nintendo got some technically accomplished studio to assist them imo. I fully expect both the cross-gen Legends Z-A on Switch 2 and the first Switch 2 exclusive Pokemon game to look underwhelming graphically. Switch 2 might have specs that are about on par with PS4 in handheld mode and somewhere between PS4 Pro and Xbox Series S when docked, but I'm certainly not expecting Pokemon Legends Z-A or Pokemon Gen 10 to come out looking like the best looking PS4 and Xbox One exclusives or multiplat games, heck it may not even look as good as the best looking Switch 1 games as sad as that is.  

I expect the switch 2 to be close to a series s on specs , if not better, by the time it launches. Been 4.5 years now since current gen launched. If you're thinking ps4 level performance, your kidding yourself.

LOL so many people don't get it. GameFreaks don't make Pokemon the way it is because they can't make the graphics great. They make it the way it is because that's the way they want to make it.

Otherwise, like GTA, they'd only make a Pokemon game every 10 years.

This would be the dream.

At the very least Switch 2 will give them more room to be lazy and still have decent modern open world pokemon game. I do think their level of ambition has risen a lot, even if the execution is still poor. If Pokemon ZA is a smaller sized game, it might be a good entry for them to focus more on quality and learn some modern development tricks and QA. We should see come April