People complaining about the lack of national dex (myself included) are missing the point of it afaic. The game seeks to balance itself for competitive play by limiting what is available to the player. This has been the case since Gen 1, and most notably so in the gba days. It blows from an aesthetic and roleplay perspective, however you slice it. Absolutely. No arguments.
There's an issue with the way the game's seeking out to balance itself, I think. If we're talking pure VGC, they could have stayed with what they were doing, have formats each year. Sun and Moon's first format was its regional dex only. If they wanted to change up what Pokemon can be used, they can easily come up with formats and rulesets, just like any competitive game.
You could even potentially do something like Smash 4 did, i.e. "for fun" and "for glory" which have casual and competitive rulesets, respectively. The people who want to play the competitive format could do that, thus creating its own meta by limiting what the player can have.
If you look at something like Smash Bros, they allow for game balance because of how many rulesets can be chosen. 100 Stages in the new one, some of them are banned, and only used for fun. Items can either be on or off, the list goes on. You have your fun rulesets, and your tournament legal ones, but the best part about it is
it allows people to play the game the way they want to play it. Pokemon, in a sense, also allowed for this for the past entries in the series. Wanted to run around with a team of legendaries? You can do that. Use your old teams after you beat the game? Go ahead. Breed for
your favorite Pokemon, despite it not being in the region? With a bit of work, you can do that too! Not to mention the infinite amount of combinations a huge roster of Pokemon can create for fun matches and strategies. There's so many ways to play Pokemon. Or at least-there
were so many ways to play Pokemon until now. Because they're trying to balance the format, they're in turn killing what made Pokemon so great. It's so easy to just say "Here's a format, use these Pokemon and you can't use these", allowing the people who are interested to do that, and the people who aren't do do their own thing. But that's not possible anymore. Sure, you can
find new ways to have fun in SwSh, but it's still taking away from a lot of players' enjoyments of the game. It's so anti-Pokemon.
Part of it though, and I genuinely think this, part of all these issues would be solved if they just
delayed the game. But they can't TPC needs it out for the holidays. Period. It's becoming a rushed product because they HAVE to release it alongside all the other merchandise they've already gotten started making. This isn't going to stop, so what they really need to do is either share the development with a second developer, or get more staff at Game Freak. Young, new blood, who cares about the series and wants to make it hit its stride again that we haven't seen in years. Talented programmers, graphics artists, etc. etc. They're split between developing Town and developing SwSh. They don't have that many people working on Pokemon as it is. I wish they'd take the road that Luigi's Mansion 3 or Animal Crossing are taking-genuine love, care, and hard work in creating a product that not only goes above and beyond, but
listens to the fans. Read forums, see what people want, like LM3 is doing. Not only would it be good for the consumers, but it would also be good press for the company as well.
