I love the new Galar forms and it's not just gen 1 this time! Also new evolutions for old pokemon, and not a complete chump for a rival! (Hop is just Hao 2.0 >.>)
I've been cautiously optimistic about Dexit, assuming there was some real reason for it that we'd see soon, and we still haven't seen that reason (animations and visuals are out cause those are largely identical aside, so it's got to be some kind of functional reason).
One reason I thought of that would explain Dexit was
Old pokemon reworks:
Reworks would take a lot of work to apply across the board, and if they want to establish a baseline how they want to distinguish pokemon in battle, it'd be best to start with a smaller set and make sure that is really solid in design and direction before moving forward with reworking everything.
The reason I think pokemon needs this is that the more pokemon get added, the more prevalent what I call "League Syndrome" (a nod to LoL) where if you keep adding characters and you don't do enough to distinguish them, so they slowly end up blending together more and more to the point where anything new just seems like a slight variation of something that already exists.
To avoid this I think it's important that moving forward, all pokemon have a signature move and/or ability to distinguish them for a long time, because unique type combos don't last forever.
Pokemon like Carnivine are a great example of something that should be unique, but instead are bland and forgotten about as it's an obvious contender for a signature ability that makes it do something interesting when exposed to bugs like heal on hit and perhaps even trap them from fleeing when hit by contact moves, but instead it just got the lazy way out by slapping on a few generic abilities that a bunch of other pokemon have.
Other issues with pokemon so far:
- Gen 1-3 pokemon have stats designed under and old system (before phys/spec split), and thus they need to have their stats redone. i.e. Seviper was meant to be offensive, but since it used normal and poison type moves, it needed balanced atk and sp atk, so it's bulk is unnecessarily low.
- Obviously having every type combo in the game is a goal, but some are just inherently bad. For this reason I think type combos should function differently, such as being closer to the card game in that they hand pick a few types for them to be weak to and resist instead of just automatically pairing the types so pokemon like Abomasnow don't end up with 7 weaknesses. Just pick 1-4 weaknesses and resists depending on the pokemon.
This change wouldn't have to be confusing in battle either if the pokedex functioned in battle, letting you display a pokemon's advantages and disadvantages and having automatic indicators on attacks (visual indicators for resist, weak, and neutral).