As an initial bit of context, I mainly played 4th and 5th gen games, skipped 6th gen and played 7th gen. After the big letdown of Moon, I vowed to never buy a mainline pokemon game until after game freak released a dignified pokemon game (needless to say, I'm still waiting). So, currently my interaction with the games is mainly by second-hand experience.
So, I recently realised I had completely missed the ZA release and had no idea of what the new megas where (apart from a few I had seen during spoiler season) and how the game turned out to be. So, as you could be expecting I started looking around, mainly on youtube, for reviews and discussions of the game.
At this point I have seen videos both extremely critic of the game and rather defensive about it, but I encountered exactly one that has left me completely perplexed.
That video is mhswoocer's video about comparisons between Digimon Story Time Stranger and Pokemon Legends ZA, which I currently believe must be the most in bad faith collection of arguments I have seen on the topic.
Fundementally, my problem with the kind of argument this video makes can be summed up with how it tries to nitpick the smallest possible differences between the two games to (in its own faulty logic) invalidate comparisons that would make Pokemon ZA look bad with what should be its main competition.
This has dawned on me a rather serious question about the pokemon community: has it become so accostumed to low quality in recent years and starved for improvements that anything that could technically qualify as higher quality garbage magically qualifies as a good game? And why should pokemon not be compared with other Monster Tamer games or even other RPGs ? Do we really want to consider Pokemon a standalone genre, while still calling out any minimal similarity with the game a rip-off of pokemon?
by Tombets_srl