No, what I want to ask this community now is to give me a good reason why the long-standing obsession with absolute backwards compatibility wasn't the true mistake all along, a parasitic presence that only gimped this franchise harder the more Pokemon were made and the more difficult it got to port them over between games. Is there something I'm overlooking here? Is there reason to believe Legends Arceus is but a fluke before we return to business as usual in Gen 9? Abominable PR aside, could anything differently have been done for a smoother transition to this point for all parties?
I've been reading and listening to a lot of opinions, both from random redditors, VGC players, and actual game designers.
Most of the more "culturate" (aka, not your standard redditor) opinions are on the line that carrying everything in the games should have never been a thing in first place.
It was their mistake to create this standard for a series that would, eventually, have reached the point where carrying everything over was just not feasible. Not only from technical standpoint, but also from creativity one, as they would have had to come up with both reasoning for "old mechanics" like Megas or Z-moves being everywhere despite being supposedly "unique to a region".
The technical problem came up already in gen 6, with the move to 3d.
Some of the design choices that worked very well for 2d sprites, notably the choice to use "projectile type" attacks rather than actually animate the sprites, suddently become a problem when 3d is factored in. They choose to stick with a similar design to reduce development time (it's much easier to animate 3-4 attack animations per pokemon and then use some VFX after, compared to fully animate every potential type of attack both given and received), but as the games progressed and the amount of both Pokemon AND attacks increased, the problem became bigger and bigger.
A notable comparison that both in the past and now people make is with Digimon games.
We all know that Digimon and Pokemon games basically only share the monster-collectible and battling aspect and nothing else really, but something a lot of people have brought up was how Digimon games very often have fully animated attacks during battles. This was possible because from the very inception of the series, "full availability" was never a thing, so their developers were able to only animate the ones present in a game, and for that specific game. "Dexit" discussions never happened between fans of the series/game, because full portability was never a thing in first place.
Overally, the "Dexit controversy" to me is just a result of a extreme lack of foresight from GameFreaks (or whoever took that decision) already in gen 4.
They should have known it was not going to be possible at some point.
Gen 3 already did a "dexit" of sort, they should have really just stuck with it since then.
However, the damage was already done and we know where it brought.
As of now, I think that they actually should stick to "partial pokedex" games, simply because they already shown they are slow developers, and having less stuff to code in would result in higher quality in the stuff that actually is in. Plus... I'm also on the line of thought that for one fanfavourite pokemon that's missing, there's 100 that noone cares for. Everyone got mad that Greninja wasn't in SwSh, I don't recall anyone pepegaing about the lack of Wurmple though.
I also echo the people who said that it's ultimately also better to create more variety if there's never a guaranteed of which pokes will be available in a game, both from the game itself and from the competitive scene. Pokemon is a series that constantly needs to "reinvent the wheel" to keep competitive fresh, and rather than continuing to dish out super mechanics, actually changing the available cards honestly sounds like a better way to keep it interesting.
With all of that taken into consideration, I STILL don't think it's anywhere near sufficient on its own to explain the sheer quantum leap in quality and content in such a short span of time. Remember, that aforementioned 2 year gap in my posts also represents the whole span of time from SWSH to Legends Arceus. Between these two consecutive games we've received improvements to battle flow, Pokemon animations, 3d map design and the initial Wild Area concept whose sheer scope is utterly unprecedented for a franchise more accustomed to incremental improvements. If I could put into a comparison, I'd go so far as to say it would be like if on the DS we went from straight from DP to BW2 in the same timespan in terms of the advancement in using the hardware's greater potential. And frankly even that might be underrating it considering that's in relation to much weaker, less labor-intensive hardware. Don't forget, none of this is even getting into likely more Legends-specific things like the new battle system, the Styles mechanic, new statuses and the major rebalancing of the move roster to accommodate these changes, once again an unprecedented level of mechanical finetuning especially after Dynamax which saw nothing of the sort.
I will agree also that they have definitely done a notable amount of progress from the release of SwSh to Arceus, both quality wise and design wise.
The SwSh DLCs shown notable improvement to the ambitions design of the wild area, with both DLCs basically being in a giant wild area that was much more interesting, varied and way less laggy than its original counterpart. Some new concepts like a (very basic) level scaling, new types of facilities, additional QoL, new interesting (and a tad op) pokemon design came up, which are all nice to see.
But I will still caveaut that... the lack of quality in their work is still inexcusable at this year.
I do usually excuse the fact that the Switch is a terrible console when it comes to performance, but the low polygon textures of Arceus in 2022, as well as the whole problem of trying to make story focused RPG s with lot of plot exposure and absolute lack of voicing of any kind, and some horrible messes of FPS here and there, there's just no excuse for it.
Not when there's games like Xenoblade 2, Shin Megami Tensei V, Monster Hunter Rise, Super Mario Odyseey, Astral Chain, ... which run on the exact same console, have much bigger and more detailed openworld sections as well as a lot more shit going on on the screen and yet produce such amazing graphics and enthralling backgrounds.
As a lot of reviews said, Arceus is basically a diamond in rough: it really shows the potential and amazingness of what GameFreaks can come up with, except the presentation REALLY suffers from the lack of quality.
A game should never be "it's amazing and fun if you can survive the tutorial and not puke at the textures".
There's design choice, and there's quality. Some games purposely use weird designs (Minecraft, Octopath Traveler, several anime-like games, Okami, etc) but that's actually part of the intent and scope of the game. Legends to me seems tried to use an artstyle similar to Valkyria Chronicles, pastel colored, with everything looking very similar to drawing in books, but produced a weird mix of low quality textures mixed with high quality animations, which often creates a pretty weird contrast that isn't pleasant to the eyes.
TLDR:
Dexit was good.
Full portability should never have happened in first place.
Legends Arceus is a game that really shows the potential of the series and GF's design.
Gamefreaks has achieved massive improvements in last 2 years.
There's still no excuse however for the terrible quality of the graphics and for some of their choices.