So with the recent controversy around the lack of the national dex in Sword and Shield, the mediocre graphics in Sword and Shield among others, a lot of people are wondering where the series is heading.

Game Freak themselves have stated that they're starting to view Pokemon more as a side project while their main development team has started working on other games instead. I personally find this crazy as Pokemon has been responsible for like 95% of their total sales, and even with the recent focus on mobile games like Go and the new Pokemon Masters that fact will likely not change moving forward.

I'm just worried that the future games will just start lacking in quality due to the combination of the fact that they're being treated as low priority as well as the fact that they get released almost every year. I mean most fans agree that there's been a drop in quality ever since Pokemon X and Y, because those games just never felt complete and felt completely rushed. Same with Sun and Moon; due to how poor the games actually ran on the system they were made on.

What do you think? Will it gradually get better once Game Freak releases their massive new project "Town", or will it progressively get worse?

Furret : Honestly, I'd consider side projects like Town not so much as a sign of things to come for Pokemon. I for one am glad to see them trying new things for once.

What does worry me is their seemingly obsessive focus on mobile as well as crappy games focused only on nostalgia like the Let's Go games.

Game Freak's ruining their own franchise due to Pokemon based decisions, not based on trying to make entirely new non-Pokemon related games.

Personally I feel like if they gave Pokemon the Call of Duty treatment, the series would be much better going forward. The Call of Duty games are also released every year but it's a different developing company that works on each title.

They have three different developers. Treyarch develops the Black Ops games, Infinity Ward focused on Modern Warfare while Sledgehammer works on a couple of the others.

Right now, each CoD dev team released a game three years apart. If Pokemon was done this way, things might be a bit different. I mean most spin-off games are developed by other or affiliated devs, so why not do this for the main games?


Gamerforlifeforever: Game Freak actually has very little to do with those other games, all those other games are basically subcontracted by Nintendo to other companies, just not the main games.

Genius Sonority alone developed like 6 Pokemon games, Creatures developed a bunch, then of course there's Niantic and Bandai Namco and HAL

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Mystery_Dungeon:_Gates_to_Infinity



Plus I couldn't care less for Town. Practically every other dev team in existence works on multiple titles or series

I want Nintendo to own full rights of Pokémon and not allow game freak to have full developmental powers anymore. Nintendo needs to be more than just the publisher with these games, they need to oversee what gamefreak is doing. They’ve gotten so lazy, ever since Black/White it’s seemed lazy. Even though I thought Sun and Black 2 were great games, they were still lazy.

The graphics look great for Sword and Shield, by Pokémon standards. I wish it looked more like Breath of the Wild, which shouldn’t be that difficult with a top tier franchise. I just don’t think gamefreak has done what they need to do, mainly because they know we will keep buying their product.

Gamefreak doesn’t need to be focusing so hard on Town. Are that many people really going to buy it? Pokémon will sell millions of copies, but they could sell even more if they made a half decent game.

TBH I really think this whole thing would be a lot more good for some people if they made a thing like Stadium or Battle Revolution for the Switch, it would allow people to use their Pokemon and it'd be a small enough game for Game Freak to have smaller teams working on it. They wouldn't need to make expansive maps, just a few battle maps for battling. Would be a cool compromise for them.

I don't think it's gonna get better after town if anything I kinda expect it to get worse after town even more so if town does well sale wise. Worst case town does really well and game freak starts really putting all there focus in more spin offs meanwhile pokemon becomes all mobile games I don't want/think it will happen but I think it's a possibility.

zanderlex : What the hell are you talking about? Game Freak's BEEN giving the Pokemon series the "Call of Duty" treatment, and that's a major reason why the series has went downhill since Gen 6. Pokemon fans want higher quality games, not low quality games every single year.

gamerforlifeforever : Not for the main games. The CoD treatment has been for stuff like Detective Pikachu, Gale of Darkness, Ranger, Mystery Dungeon, etc

I am not super hopeful for the future of pokemon. When I discovered that Pokemon Sword/Shield was a side project (albeit developed by the senior team), this immediately explained the mediocre graphics and the lack of a National Dex. They already have such a small staff of only 143 (compare that to someone like Square Enix which has over 4,000), so the fact that their team is split between different projects means that they will putting in nonstop long hours and all-nighters, rushing to meet deadlines.

What's sad is that they can rest on their laurels knowing that their games will still sell well.

On a side note, I think the boxart for the games looks very underwhelming at best. I know that this doesn't matter to a lot of people, but I take notice of little things like this. I'm hoping these are just stock images, but somehow I doubt it.

Honestly, I think Pokemon Go is also largely responsible for the lack of quality and effort put into Sword and Shield. Pokemon Go did far better than anyone could've expected and in just 3 years since its release, it accounts for roughly 5% of the TOTAL profits of the franchise. That's huge. Many signs point to the Pokemon Company shifting their sights to the mobile market which leaves the outlook for future main series games grim. I want things to improve with time, but it's hard to say how things will turn out.

It would be nice if Game Freak could outsource more of their work or if Nintendo could take a more active role as Barathemos suggested.


With that said, I'd really like to see the Main series games treated with more love and care than they are currently being shown (it's been that way for the past 2 generations and only seems to be getting worse).

To be fair, I had a feeling in my gut since I played Pokemon Moon that it would take a bit to get me to invest in the next series of games. I already wasn't going to buy Sword or Shield under the pretense that Game Freak has the habit of releasing a prototype, then coming out with something like emerald or sequel titles. At least with BW and B2W2 they were kind of different experiences, but the ultra titles were more of a slap to the face. Same game, but we tacked on more pokemon and places that you still have to pay full price to experience.

That, and they're pretty stubborn when it comes to inclusivity. For all the preaching on how anyone can be a pokemon fan, they don't do all that much to tailor their experiences. Just a simple difficulty setting would be enough, instead the games are adding so many features that act as autowin mechanics, and if we want a challenge we either go out of our way to ignore poke refresh, rotom roulette, and exp. shares or create self imposed challenges like nuzlockes.

I think the fact that Sword and Shield, Switch games, look roughly the same as their 3DS titles, is the nail in the coffin for me. Honestly I don't care about the national dex issue, the thing that makes it a problem was that they don't care either way. People expect that less pokemon coded into the game means more attention to detail *insert clip of T-posing wingull propulsion*, but if you look at pokemon battle revolution, a game made for the wii in 2007, we had just under 500 pokemon that were fully animated, had unique expressions for taking damage and using specific moves, and I'd go as far as to say some of the graphics still looked better than they do now. Have you SEEN dugtrio in Battle Revolution going nuts with the battle theme? Someone better have a gif of that thing's idle animation, in fact I'm going to look right now.

I couldn't find it, actual blasphemy.

So there's a solid chance that Moon was the last game I get for a while. I'm still a fan at heart, I'll be over there, watching from a window, cataloging the stats and abilities of Wooloo when I get them, and waiting for Pokemon Reborn and Crystal Clear to update.

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A lot of people has stated that the Pokemon franchise is getting worse and worse.

As for me, unless Diamond/Pearl remakes are released during Generation VIII, this generation would be the 2nd Generation I would skipped (the other being Gen IV, but that skip was only because of outside interference with being bullied and all, but returned just after the release of Gen V), but skipping Gen VIII is because of the series itself that got me uninterested in the series once again.

Unless Game Freak or Nintendo pick things back up with the Gen IX games they're going to keep on going downhill.

Personally to me, the last great Pokemon games were Black 2 / White 2, then after B2/W2, the series started to go downhill, starting with X/Y, the gameplay of X/Y was ok, but the storyline was bland as bland can get, which alone caused the series to suffer dramatically, and even caused Gen VI to be the worse generation of the series, and ORAS didn't do much to save the generation.

As for Gen VII, it was kind of a step in the right direction somehow, but not by much, but I was giving high hopes that they would be recovering to their original format that they abandoned in Gen VI, and then the Let's Go games happened, and that idea was thrown out the window.

Personally, I haven't even played a main Pokemon title since November of 2018, and that's been like 9 months ago (well, thanks to the Let's Go games, and frequently playing Super Smash Bros Ultimate).

Plus I'm also not interested in Sword/Shield, mostly because I'm still highly interested more in Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and the heat with that game more in likely won't cool down for awhile, like the heat from SSB4 took 2 years since release to cool down.


Now with the 25th Anniversary of the Pokemon franchise on the horizon (less than 2 years away), I know that The Pokemon Company, Game Freak, and Nintendo has something big planned, for the huge milestone like maybe an announcement of the first pair of Gen IX games, which means that Gen VIII could be a short generation (if that's the case), and depending on what they are going to do with the Gen IX games, it will either make or break them.


Mecha Leo : I am the same way as well, Ultra Moon has technically been my last Pokemon game, and the way it looks like, I more in likely won't play another main Pokemon titles until probably the remakes of Diamond/Pearl, and then after that, more in likely when the remakes of Black/White are released, and Black & White remakes will more in likely be my endgame with the Pokemon franchise, which means that Black & White remakes will be the final Pokemon games I'll ever play before retiring from the series.

In my honest opinion I believe pokemon will gradually get worse as time progresses. I say this because the pokemon designs are getting more and more uninspired and stale as the generations continue and honestly it seems as though game freak and the pokemon company are just plain running out of ideas and stuck between riding on past glory lack and trying new innovation within there games. Believe me the core pokemon games have long past hit there peak (to me the best pokemon game will forever be emerald for the post game) and it seems like game freak and the pokemon company have realized the same formula for the past 20 years is running stale and granted they have been trying to keep up with the times by integrating smart phone apps/games into the mix with pokemon under the assumption that the new generation audience (people born after 2010) won't and dont have the time or rather the attention span to engage in a full length pokemon journey for example the reason the battle frontier was cut from omega ruby and alpha sapphire was because they didnt believe gamers/fans would have invested time into playing the post game. So for that reason alone and with the resent success of pokemon go and the rising attention pokemon masters is getting I believe the core games are going to disappear within the next 5-10 years