Ok, hear me out. I am a giant Pokémon fan since forever, and I love the mechanics and character design in the mainline games. But gamefreak as a developer is laughably far behind every other developer working with or for Nintendo.
They are consistently behind technically:
This one is pretty much the crux of it for me. GF consistently falls below the baseline standard Nintendo sets for their systems. Standards that other Devs hit commonly. XY and ORAS didn't have 3D in the over world, and SM didn't have it for battles either. Can you name another 3ds game (1st or 3rd party) that doesn't feature the 3D visuals, a key feature of the system? And even once they get XY running, they can't even get consistent 30fps out of it. SM features bad performance as well even though it doesn't have 3D battles. They are showing that they can't develop an HD game nearly 5 years after nintendos first HD system the Wii U. And their games are infamous for game breaking bugs and save errors.
They are too conservative:
Last time I checked, gamefreak Dev team was something like 35 individuals. Now I know that the Pokémon brand has a LOT of other people and companies involved. (Nintendo, TPC, creatures inc, etc) but why the hell is the developer of a mega hit billion dollar franchise like Pokémon so tiny and slow? They can only barely produce the games they do on time, and even then they are plagued with technical problems. So why the hell haven't they expanded some more to compensate? They have the cash, it screams incompetence and or laziness/stagnation.
They are bad at systems design.
With the exception of the battle system and maybe the breeding system, nearly every other system in the Pokémon games has been time consuming, un-fun, unnnecesarry, or flat out broken. The festival plaza is the most recent example. I know the excuse is that they were supposedly leaving the 2 screen design behind, but now we know it had nothing to do with switch and was just shoddy design. Why the shit should I have to leave the game and load a deprecate area anytime I want to do anything online? Especially when it's 2017 and the previous games didn't require it and the system doesn't either. It's just straight up bad design. So is the hyper training mechanic, making us level up our Pokémon to 100 does NOTHING for the players except waste their time. Why should we have to get them leveled up that high to change their stats when the official level scaling for standard battles is 50? Just because they wanted an artificial barrier. They also commonly fail to implement overarching system functions from the handheld their games are on in favor of developing their own crappy ones. Instead of nintendos own friends list or wifi connect service, they always want you to have a separate lobby and friends list with its own ins and out. It's just bloated and unnecessary.
please let me know what you guys think. I'm sure there are things I'm not considering but I'm really souring on GF right now.