Don't make nonsense accusations. Pokemon has historically been one of my favourite game series I have no desire for it to disappear. I want them to return to proper form and actually evolve with the times. If calling the biggest media franchise in the world out for having low budget, technically poor and antiquated titles is a hate-driven bandwagon then so be it. Frankly I think they should be doing better than being completely technically outclassed by almost every other developer of Switch exclusive titles when they're one of the biggest franchises in the world.

Even diehard Nintendo fans on this site call gamefreak out on their bullshit. That I think they should be far more ambitious with titles that will gross over a billion dollars is not some unreasonable demand. Most other developers put far more effort into their far smaller titles. Monolith craps all over them with what should be a tiny fraction of the resources that the developer of a pokemon game should have.

The issue with this logic is that it's only one way to look at things. Monolith makes excellent games just like the Zelda team but Pokemon's consistency is largely ignored to praise developers that release games every blue moon. It's nice that many consumers prefer them to slow down the cadence of releases in order to improve "quality" which is subjective but these critics don't get to speak for the entire userbase. Millions of consumers want content as soon as possible and if sacrificing prettier graphics or whatever helps them deliver more content then so be it, that's something Monolith and the Zelda team fail to deliver, consistent software. Pokemon has sold millions of more games than those franchises because of the consistency similar to Call of Duty. Call of Duty was able to catch and outsell Grand Theft Auto because GTA games take forever while CoD delivers content consistently like Pokemon.

We don't need to clamp down on discontent as if Gamefreak is being bullied, or threads designed to share experiences about the games are being burried under pages of negativity.

I think there is a lot of fair criticsm leveraged at the game and from the fanbase. And the game falling short commercially isn't exactly the end of the franchise, the lowest estimated in the prediction thread was 15million lol. The games could sell a quarter of what they sell and still be wildly profitable, spawning endless future sequels. Of course fair if you want to celebrate it's sales too,  same as those who may want to express disappointment.

The thing is, with the amount of money Pokemon brings in they should be able to provide quality on a consistent basis. They have enough money to have multiple large teams all working on different projects. 3 decently sized teams, with a 6 year dev time would be a game every 2 years, or even 2 teams with a 4 year gap between releases would probably see an improvement.

But for some reason we are in a situation where Game Freak works on a shoe string budget with little resources working to push out a game basically bi-annually. 

The resources game freak had back when they were making Pokemon for the DS/3DS and prior was enough. But on a modern HD system they clearly don't have enough to be delivering at the same pace (but they still try to keep that schedule anyway). As Miyamoto said, developing for the WiiU required twice as much resources as developing for the Wii. Now imagine how much more resources developing for the Switch compared to the 3DS needs. Why they are still a relatively smaller team working with so little money on the biggest media franchise in the world is just crazy.

Of all the IP Nintendo has, Pokemon shouldn't be the one that's not delivering the high quality they are known for.

Honestly I agree with you but I can't say I don't see the improvements they have been making and you should consider Nintendo is much more "conservative" than the rest of the industry. Nintendo sees what you see as well, GameFreak I'm pretty sure was also part of the massive development building Nintendo built. They see GameFreak needs help and hopefully we see this in the future games. ZA is still a Switch game and was born from the SV engine due to only Mesgoza from SV being the only comparable city to Lumiose in ZA in terms of scale. Hopefully Gen X which leaks revealed is set for next year (again consistency) delivers what we desire. Open world Pokemon with overworld catching and the action based battles ZA gave us a glimpse of.

This varies from bubble to bubble. In the bubbles I follow (mostly reddit) everyone is ranting about how bad this game is, except in the casualnintendo subreddit 

The thing with Pokemon is it's don't rely too much older fanbase (which is the one who complains the most)

As an older fan, I dropped the IP during Sword and Shield (arguably the worst game I've played in the last 8 or so years), I did that after many mixed to bad experiences starting with Sun and Moon which destroyed the competitive scene (5th and 6th gen were the best ones for VGC)

However for every older fan dropping the franchise, there will always be new kids or teenagers ready to play for the first time. The Pokemon Company is very careful with curating the marketing and advertisement to always renovate its fandom, and they develop their games with kids in mind. The marketing budget for Pokemon is several times bigger the development costs, this certainly makes an statement of what they are actually wanting to achieve with their games 

While it was only one leaked screenshot I saw Wind/Waves does look like a big improvement, on a whole new engine. Whether they can deliver or not I'm not confident but it's certainly their chance to prove that they can start delivering again.

I mean, no one has an automatic right to sell a lot of copies. The fact that AAA budget games often sell less than Pokemon mostly just means that they need to adjust their budgets downwards according to their real sales potential. No one would scale up the budget of a game if it can sell AAA amounts of copies on a lower budget, its a business after all.

Pokemon became a mega franchise already back in the 90s with the first game, made by a very small team and ran on hardware that was very antiquated at that point. Budget and presentation has never been what made Pokemon big, which is why it isn't comparable to say Final Fantasy which only got big from FF7 and its high budget and solid presentation, which led Square Enix to need to chase ever higher budgets to keep up the presentation level it needed to sell big numbers. Pokemon never had that issue due to getting big from entirely different aspects than graphically looking good.

Exactly. People can celebrate if all they care about is Nintendo making money, probably same people who celebrated Nintendo jacking up prices a ton without cause on everything this gen. But for anyone who likes pokemon or wants good games, this is just pathetic.

Z-A is a new low for Game Freak and Pokemon. It's laughable how obviously little effort went into the game, far less than the other Switch Pokemon games. It's like Game Freak (or maybe Nintendo, whoever is in charge of the budget for this franchise) decided that mediocre games were too good for the franchise and just turned down the dial on absolutely every feature in the game. And it is such a tarnishing of the decent brand for Legends that Arceus had started. Arceus was the one glimmer of hope for Pokemon the past 8 years and Z-A just trashed the Legends series. It's a small, bad, zero effort game that looks like it was made 25 years ago for the Dreamcast but just in HD, and still would have been considered mediocre back then.

Anyone celebrating this as a "success" really needs to check themselves. As a gamer you're supposed to like and want good games, not reward companies for feeding you full priced slop and then celebrating millions of people's blind loyalty. What happened to getting mad at game companies when they stop caring about consumers and put out terrible games?? Is that not a thing anymore? Well, it obviously still is for many people seeing as how most user scores of this game are rightly in the 2-3 out of 10 range, but it's sad to see some people actually celebrate sales as though it's a replacement for an actual good game.

Z-A is a really sad moment for pokemon, nintendo, and gaming in general as I think this finally marks the complete downfall of the once celebrated Pokemon gaming franchise. This game seemed to be the final ultimate test by Game Freak to see if they can put in as little effort as humanly possible, and still sell normal pokemon numbers, and the answer is apparently yes. Which means we should probably never expect a good or even decent Pokemon game again because consumers have just validated their zero-effort approach.

Game Freak I think at this point is the most uncaring game studio in a biz of many uncaring studios, and Pokemon is the biggest joke up a franchise in gaming at this point, at that's saying a lot! But it's true.

Even though Gamefreak is not ambitious, its clear the Pokemon Company and Nintendo care a lot about quality. And gradually they are improving different aspects of the world. It's a shame though that it often feels like 1 step forward, 1 step back in terms of the actual games.

About 2-3 years ago the quality of Pokemon marketing material and quality of writing shot up quite a lot