Pokemon reminds me of Madden and other yearly sports titles in the sense they add features, remove them, add them again, then remove them again. Dig around the sportsball gamer community and you'll find
lists of features removed from madden and
more lists of features.
Pokemon is the same way. It's a yearly half baked title with numerous quality of life features added and removed each gen. They don't keep the features in the game to make the biggest and best Pokemon game ever, so there are some Pokemon fans asking every single year "where the fuck is my Battle Frontier at?" While some omissions were forced in both cases (Pokemon's Game Corner and Madden's ambulances come to mind) a lot were due to sheer laziness and the fact they shit these games out yearly. The only difference is Pokemon is praised by tons of shills online while Madden is the longest running joke in gaming.
What's especially galling is that with X and Y, they reversed the trend, at least for a little while. You were literally playing the game within minutes, you could access trading facilities and super training out the gate, and the game as a whole was much more user-friendly an experience. Everything was at your fingertips with little roadblocked by progress walls. It's a game that respected your time, unlike Black and White which basically did nothing but delay shit constantly. It felt like someone was finally paying attention to what the community wanted for a change.
.....So you can imagine my surprise when Sun and Moon had none of that, tutorialized everything, had long boring unskippable cutscenes, progress walled basically every major function of the game for fucking stupid reasons and did everything possible to prevent players from accessing the main toolkit out the gate. Basically everything of value in X and Y from a usability standpoint got binned because fuck you and replaced with infinitely shittier versions that were worse by every single metric. The only connecting aspect? The things that got axed were all things that the hardcore fans liked. There was a message there: That Game Freak wanted to steer the player's experience, not let the player have their own adventure on their own terms - You will use what we give you, when we give you it, how we want you to, and you will not deviate from the railroad. And to that I say fuck yourself. Pokemon always worked better when it gave you a starter, a goal, and a toolkit and told you to go find your own adventure in the process. All the games in the series I loved, from Red all the way up to X and Y, understood that and didn't saddle me down with faffing around like a tard. All the games in the series I hated (Black and White, Sun and Moon) did
the exact fucking opposite.
I felt like Pokemon was increasingly becoming not for me, and that's fine. It's not like I don't have a back-catalogue of games a mile long by now. I was already guarded against Sword and Shield because I knew that odds were good that the game was just going to waste more fucking time for no reason and on pointless side content no one cared about, just like Black and White did and just like Sun and Moon did. That's exactly what fucking happened, of course; I watched a let's play of SwSh and laughed my ass off when I saw that there was a long unskippable cutscene right after Pokemon selection to make it harder for players to save scum for a female.
For Madden, the doom of the series came when EA realized that they could literally re-release the same game with a roster update and stupid sports fans would buy it. Game Freak with Pokemon isn't dissimilar in this regard, but instead of simply releasing the same game over and over, they have been changing it - and making it a more hand-holdy, linear experience that will not keep content that players actually like. I can't say what's motivating them to do this, but I do know that it makes absolutely clear that they don't care about what their players want, and that's arguably just as bad.
