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They're not unrealistic expectations in that Game Freak has for the most part delivered these exact features and standards for 22 games now (not counting the five Game Boy games). Pokemon has always been like Smash Bros, kid-friendly but there's nerdy underbelly you can push your glasses up at if you want to.

There's very few games that got people's imaginations going like the first legitimate mainline console Pokemon game, and Game Freak is not the company you expect to under-deliver up until they do. It's still Pokemon so it's still fun, but it's also still definitively the worst mainline Pokemon game for features. Pokemon Sun/Moon removed some features but kept more than it didn't, and the last game that removed Pokemon was Ruby/Sapphire in the move to the GBA, and they rectified that by re-releasing Red/Blue(Green) remakes, and the generation itself added and redefined modern Pokemon mechanics that are still used today, whereas for the most part, Sword and Shield have subtracted. Now I'm a heavy-duty fan of Diamond/Pearl so if they release those and add a lot of the Pokemon they left out, I'll probably look on this generation more favourably.

Ep 18