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| Image by Donnpati |
Pokemon, as a series, is extremely slow to change. Likely due to a fear of alienating an audience and impacting sales, the series has stuck remarkably close to its roots, keeping the original 2D sprites, first debuted in 1996, up until White/Black 2, which came out in 2012. While the sprites definitely improved, 16 years without a major change in the series is perhaps one of the longest spans in the industry for a series to go sticking to it's guns.
It was 2014's XY that broke the mold, launching Pokemon into the "modern" era.
This all changed with Pokemon X/Y. GameFreak's first Pokemon entry to the 3DS was amazing. Gorgeous 3D graphics made the game feel so much more modern compared to White/Black 2 which was only a year prior. The changing camera views let them do some interesting things with caves, and also imparted an almost cinematic feel to certain areas. Areas like Route 7, where the camera pans out and drops for a side-scrolling effect, really lets you enjoy the quality of the art that GameFreak made for the game.
X/Y had the NPC friends that helped break things up. Sana's friendship scenes and a decent story helped break the mold a bit. ORAS, however, due to it's nature as a remake, felt old despite looking as good as X/Y did. ORAS's post game, the Delta Episode, however, was where that game shone. The story was fascinating, forging a link between all of the games' 18 year long span, took you into SPACE, and had you acting as the usual saviour, but as the champion of the league (the important bit).
What Pokemon needs is to keep changing. There's a lot of hold over from the old games, some of which would be real cool to change. They've got a great model to work off of, and it certainly has changed for the better, but that model, at it's core, is still very much the same model.
