Are the 8th and 9th generation pokemon games as bad as people say?

[Xdqwerty]

I heard they look ugly, that they are too easy. too linear, too buggy and they lack like 25 % of the pokemon.

 

[Dondonuts]

My opinion, sword and shield was pretty bad. It's super easy and is very linear, you just move from town to town without anything blocking you, barely any puzzles or what. and contrary to the trailers it's not really big, only one area was big and there's nothing ther but wild pokemon, no side quests or anything. The characters were pretty bland too

 

[a_username_that_isnt_cool]

never played pokemon aside from FireRed for my romhack, but hear they have worse and worse gameplay

 

[nintendo_leaker]

Skip Sword and Shield. They're mediocre at best and not worth your time. You just walk from point A to point B with easy but slow battles wasting your time along the way.

Skip Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. They're better than Sword and Shield but still not that great.

Scarlet and Violet apparently have good gameplay but I skipped them because they're a technical mess.

If you want to play a good Pokemon game then play Pokemon Legends: Arceus on an overclocked Switch.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I heard they look ugly, that they are too easy. too linear, too buggy and they lack like 25 % of the pokemon.

Sword/Shield were pretty mediocre. I liked some aspects of them (like you now have "boss fights" that feel like actual boss fights), but the wild areas (which were the big gimmick) were underutilized, they should've just replaced routes, and that was a huge disappointment for me once I realized that there was actually just one big wild area and most of the game took place on normal routes. The games were too short, had zero postgame, and adding mediocre paid DLC later on (which seems like they could've just been cut from the initial release due to time constraints) to pad it out doesn't make up for the fact that you sold people a rushed game at full price. I hated the gym battle music, gym battles used to be the highlight of every mainline Pokemon game and that was in large part thanks to the banging music.
I still enjoyed them but I regret my purchase because I do not think they were worth the money considering how short they are.

Scarlet/Violet are pretty damn good. If you can look past the jank (which I highly suggest you do), they do a lot of things right. They just needed more time in the oven. At least this time around, Game Freak didn't skimp on the content, cause there's lots of it. I never experienced most of the bugs people complained about (sadly, not even the funny ones), the main thing that detracted from the experience for me was how very obviously visible things would often run at 5 FPS. I appreciate that they are finally making attempts at at optimization, but that's not the right way to do it, Optimize where it won't be obvious to the player, like how every other modern or semi modern game does it. If Game Freak can figure that one out, I think this new open world style of mainline Pokemon could be a winner.

Legends Arceus I feel doesn't get mentioned nearly enough, it deserves praise. Gameplay and engine wise, they nailed everything. They could've just used that engine for Scarlet/Violet and called it a day, because it does a lot of the same things (and does some things better, such as how battling and catching wild pokemon works) without the high level of jank. Story wise it just isn't quite what I want out of a Pokemon game, but YMMV on that. I still enjoyed it quite a bit and I always recommend it to people.

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They are fairly ugly. Not to an offensive level, but they still look like upscaled 3DS games. I know the Switch is capable of so much more with the right dev team. Game Freak needs to hire more people with experience creating modern AAA games. That doesn't prevent me from enjoying the games though. I wish Pokemon had graphics like Zelda BotW/TotK, but in the end, graphics aren't what matter most.

I don't get the "too easy" complaint. Pokemon games have always been easy. You can steamroll every single trainer in every game by just using your starter and you don't even need to catch any other Pokemon apart from some HM whores (in the games that use HMs), it can't get much easier than that. If you want a challenge, try competitive battling, or set yourself artificial limits, like doing a nuzlocke.

Too linear, I can understand. Although, that is hardly a new thing for Pokemon. The original R/B/Y were hella basic and linear. Things got less linear after that, and then they got more linear again at some point. But they've always been rather linear, rarely were you given a choice of which path to take, and even when the path split in two, one of the paths were blocked off for some reason or other. If you had to backtrack, you were told exactly where you had to go by some NPC (and it was usually after you got Fly so it's not like backtracking meant much)
Though, the thing with Scarlet/Violet is that it gives the impression of not being linear, but you soon figure out that the levels of wild Pokemon and trainers alike are actually still designed for you to go through the areas in a specific order, even if it doesn't force you to. Due to how it's designed as an open world game, it makes you wish this was not the case, even though it's probably still less linear than other mainline Pokemon games, since you are allowed freedom in which order you want to do the quests in the different quest lines, and you aren't given many pointers on how to find the locations apart from the icons on your map. Level scaling (possibly based on how many badges you have) is one thing they absolutely should have implemented, at bare minimum. Hopefully the next generation will have it, because I hope they stick with the open world style.

Buggy/janky - yeah, as mentioned above, that's the main issue Scarlet/Violet has. None of it is gamebreaking, so I managed to look past it, but it was a bit annoying.

Missing pokemon - This doesn't bother me at all. I decided a long time ago that I was going to try using the new Pokemon in any given generation as much as possible (or at least Pokemon I hadn't previously used) rather than just keep using the same handful of favorites along with my preferred starter. As long as the roster doesn't absolutely suck and there's a decent amount of cool/unique/good Pokemon among the new ones, this is IMO the best way to fully experience a new generation. I've gotten more enjoyment out of the games since I started doing this, since it makes me try out new typings and new moves which changes the way battles play, so I can't just stick to the same old tactics.

 

[SAIYAN48]

Want a good Pokemon game? Play some quality hacks. Unbound is amazing.