I am playing Pokemon Violet at the moment and it is a total bore. I have played the game so many times and I just want to run around catch Pokemon and battle.
I do not need another tutorial about what a Pokemon center is. Or a tutorial to tell me that I need to use a Pokeball to catch a Pokemon.
Can we get a "I've played this game 100 times" mode where it just saves the tutorials and lets us play the game?
I personally lost interest in Pokémon after gen four. SoulSilver was my last game until a few years ago, so I'm kind of biased with that, but still. I think Pokémon designs started going downhill after gen five, plus all the over the top hand holding and tutorial stuff. The worst part to me however is the apparent lack of care and resources put into the newer games. A game like S/V is downright embarrassing as a modern game. Like hilariously bad.
I think Gen 5 was the last non-"commerical" games. Almost all games since then are way too simple, it's like playing a visual novel. AND SO SLOW - I haven't found much other people who related to this, but the movement, animations, and general gameplay feel slow and bloated.
tbf - the games didn't get too easy either, all the enemy trainers have ev trained pokemon with perfect IVs in later gens, so much so that nuzlocking them is apparently harder than old games. That doesn't change the fact that there's too much handholding tho.
Also, Pokemon Legends: Arceus was pretty neat. Not a classic pokemon game, but a polished one atleast.
A lot of it is to blame on blind fans - people will buy any random crap that comes out with a pokemon stamp and let Gamefreak escape the consequences
Gen 4 was the worst for slowness IMO, Platinum improved it a bit but DP was horrible in that regard. I can't play any Pokemon games outside an emulator with a speed control at this point, it's just miserable.
I've always heard five is pretty good, so I definitely need to play it at some point; I've mean to for years. Maybe I'll emulate that on my Steam Deck this weekend! Arceus was pretty good too, though I didn't finish because my sticks got insane drift when I was playing that and I just lost interest due to that.
I think every generation has at least some great designs no matter what. I can't remember what gen number Sword and Shield are, but the fox that you can find pretty early on was a really standout design to me, for example.