View attachment 3979071
Another addition to my collection.
Clodsire is a treasure.
I think there's a few factors in why pokemon hasn't fallen apart yet. A lot of them are similar to Sonic.
1: Doesn't disrespect the original games. If anything, respects specific aspects of them too much. How many times have we had charizard? How many times have we gone back to green hill zone? Then you have Alfornada and the mosaics based on the most classic party sprites...
2: Too different from the main competitors. The Main competitors I would say are Digimon, SMT and Persona, Yo-kai Watch, DQM and it's sequels and Siralim. All six of these are fundamentally different from Pokemon in how you gather creatures, what those creatures are based on, how those creatures relate to each other, the art style, the battle system, etc. It's just too different for someone who likes Pokemon's system that they're gonna scratch that itch through it. Likewise, there's no mainstream series that does what Sonic does, and other high speed games are just too different (like Clustertruck)
3: Those who actually try to closely compete with them often cock it up, whether by choice or by limitation. There's a large stable of games that constantly pop up and try to challenge Pokemon on it's own terms. Temtem, Coromon, Nexomon, all directly trying to compete with Pokemon in Pokemon's own lane. All of them discard some - for lack of a better term - surface-level depth (things like Nexomon drastically reducing the variety of types and nullifying their uneven matchups) or sacrifice quality of life features for one demographic either to appeal to another (like Temtem making breeding fucking asinine and removing ways to easily cap it in service of trying to shove it into an mmo format) or just for the sake of being different (Coromon's terrible Potentiflator system means that, basically, I need to shiny hunt a mon if I want it to be viable in comp). And then, at the same time, they keep choices that don't make sense in their new format just because Pokemon did it. All three of those games have six-mon teams with four moves each, in spite of having a drastically reduced pool of types and various stamina systems added. You'd think that'd lead to less mons with more moveslots in at least one of them. Hell, focused-on-competitive temtem has it's official battle mode requiring a total of 8 temtem, with a pick and ban phase leading to a final team of 4 temtem... and it's still using six in the campaign. Using either 4 or 8 would make tons of sense, so why are they using 6? because Pokemon uses six.
Compare that to Monster Sanctuary and Siralim, two games which also use six monsters to a team. Monster Sanctuary uses 3v3 battles as a default, with a heavy emphasis on teamwork and synergy, so having 6 mons to a team makes for two whole separate setups or one very customisable setup. It also means in their competitive mode, your strategy won't fall apart because the other guy went first and airstruck a core mon off the map. Siralim likewise is 6v6, with again a heavy focus on big powerful synergies. As a result, both games have significantly more passive abilities per mon and varying amounts of moves depending on build. They fundamentally differ from pokemon's format, and the one superficial similarity makes perfect sense with their other design philosophies.
This is all seperate to the moment-to-moment decisions, like "Nexomon's
fucking constant eye-rolling fourth-wall lines not only make me want to claw out my own eyes, but they also break the immersion of the apocalyptic world they're trying to build". Or the budgetary ones, which meant people fled from dexit to a game which would, eventually, in about two more years of dev time, peak at about 40% of the monsters of a post-dexit dex.
So these games that are meant to be "Pokemon But Better" are usually at best "Pokemon But Some Mechanics are Different", and are far more commonly "Pokemon But Fundamentally Worse". And the people with the talent and resources to theoretically challenge Pokemon can probably calculate it's just not worth the risk to try.
The only real comparable game in recent years to Sonic is the Freedom Planet series, which does closely emulate the 2d games... but adds on all the characterisation and banter of the 3d ones
which is part of what frustrates a huge portion of the fanbase. Literally just one character's story in Freedom Planet 2, including mid-mission discussions, is longer than the whole storyline of Sonic forces. Compare that to Sonic Mania, where they're blissfully silent.
4: Pokemon Fans are spoiled rotten. They act like things like not only preserving the whole dex, but allowing people to transfer their mons across consoles is some kind of industry standard, rather than functionally unique to this series.
5: Massive Fucking Inertia.
Pokemon Showdown. Whole youtube channels dedicated just to one subset of Pokemon topics, or challenge running ONE GAME. Dozens of fangames. Redesigns of Pokemon to match new mechanics for games they're not in.
I could go on but i've been popping in and out on this, plucking away in short bursts all day and it's now 2am
