Regardless of what audience it appeals to, the easiness is one of the main reasons that I disliked the game, along with the horrible gameplay, such as being able to play with only one joy-con, which made playing on the television very uncomfortable. You literally have to play Pokémon Let's Go handheld (in your own home) to enjoy it with both joy-cons, which is ridiculous. By the way, when I said "trainer battles," I actually meant "wild battles." That was a mistake. The question is: which remake is the worst? Yet, you didn't list anything that Pokémon Let's Go brought to the table, at least from a gameplay perspective.
Let's Go's gameplay was built for a different audience that would appreciate that gameplay. If you didn't like it, that's fine, it wasn't built for you. It was built for a PoGo audience that wanted to focus more on catching Pokemon and the occasional battle, you're a person heavily invested in the competitive scene, the game was quite made for an audience that's can very well be describe as the polar opposite of your playing style.
Wild battles are not exactly an aspect of Pokemon I find myself caring about, and more often than not they're nuisances rather than something positive to me. Just another example of how opinion can change from person to person.
When people ask a question about what remade game is "the worst," I expect others to answer the question by sharing their experiences with the game and mentioning what they enjoyed the most about it compared to the others. Mentioning that the game simply "does what it set out to do" does not relate to why you enjoyed playing it more than Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, or Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.
The type of analysis you're mentioning is fundamentally rooted on what you like, which is one way of doing media analysis, and one that is more useful if your goal is to recommend a game for example.
That is, however, not the only type of analysis. There are many other things you can talk about: art differences, what were the game goals, technical aspects, a11y concerns, and so on. I'm not concerned about "do I like it" analysis.
By your logic, you can say that everything is a "good game" for accomplishing what it sets out to do because practically every game appeals to someone.
First of all, there are games that don't accomplish what they set out to do for a variety of reasons. A Pokemon game is fundamentally made to be a product and in that case appealing to a big audience is what it set out to do. LGPE in particular managed to cater to its audience in a very technically and aesthetically competent way, and so I have no problems saying that it was a good game. It completed its purpose, it looks pretty, it serves as a springboard for a lot of art and content and stuff like that from different people, and impacted people in a way that many projects dream of ever achieving.
Yet, it explains nothing about what makes the gameplay more enjoyable than the other games it's being compared to. It depends on how you define "bad," as "bad" isn't an objective term. Many people do define things that they dislike as bad. In your analogy, saying that soccer isn't bad simply because it's the most popular sport in the world isn't relevant to why you find the game of soccer to be better than other sports. Saying something is popular implies that a large number of people enjoy it, but it says nothing about your own feelings about it. For example, for me, soccer is horrible because they very rarely score points. I value frequent, non-stop scoring in sports, which is why basketball is my favorite sport. If I said that basketball is great because it's popular, that says nothing about why I think the sport itself is great when watching it compared to others. Thus, I'm curious to know: what is it about playing the game that you find more enjoyable than the other remakes?
So you completely missed my point then. OK. The point I was making was "Me not liking something doesn't make the game bad, it just means I don't like it."
No matter the reasons I love or hate a game or a sport, all they can ever say is "I love / hate this", it doesn't imply the game is "bad" unless you're explicitly defining bad as "stuff I don't like" which is not a definition I'm using, and is not a definition I'm willing to engage with.
I'm more interested in discussing the game's financial impact, cultural impact, aesthetics, how it interacts with the game it's trying to remake, technical competence, how it implements its iteration of the formula, etc. "Whether I liked it or not" is not even attempting to address the bias. You can do it if you want, but it's not the type of analysis I want to do.
I disagree. Sure, I get that the story is very similar to Pokémon Yellow, but the game itself is practically nothing like Pokémon Yellow in the grand scheme of things because they added completely different characters, features, and a ton of new content. At that point, it might as well just be considered its own standalone game rather than a remake. Remastered games are games that are simply given an upgrade with graphics and sometimes the soundtrack. Oftentimes, developers just edit the existing code rather than making a new game from scratch when remastering a game. For example, a game like LA Noire was remastered when it was released for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 because all they did was touch up the graphics, but a game like Spyro Reignited Trilogy is a remake because they made the three Spyro games from the PlayStation 1 from scratch. Yet, despite that, it's the same game with practically the same script and everything, with only a few teenie-tiny changes here and there. Let's Go is a teenie-tiny change from Yellow; it's a huge change.
Ok, disagree then. I'm not interested in arguing about whether they're remakes or not.
Either way, now I see that you finally gave a somewhat clearer reason as to why you consider the Sinnoh remakes bad. My question is, regardless of the fact that you feel the Sinnoh remakes didn't offer you a different experience, what is it exactly that makes Let's Go more enjoyable? Does gameplay not matter to you? Is simply having a different experience in a game enough to keep you entertained?
This entire time I've said that liking something is not a necessary or sufficient criterion to something being good. Thinking it was good does not mean I necessarily enjoyed it. You can think something's good and not like it and you can think something's bad and like it.
Videogames are art, and part of being art is that "I like it" or "I enjoyed it" are not the only benchmarks you can use (and indeed are not the only benchmarks you should use in general).
As an example, Pathologic is a game that's miserable to play, but that feeling of misery is intentional, reflected into the story and makes the overall experience of that game be what it is. If Pathologic had better gameplay it would be a worse game overall, because the mechanics would clash with the story.
A piece of art that gives a different perspective into the same theme of a previous one is, in my opinion, intrinsically more valuable as a tool of expression than one that just copies the same beats with minor differences - at least in a professional level. Even if it's jankier, or uglier, or whatever, we learned something about the creative team, ourselves, the audience and the universe and perhaps more importantly, we tried something new and something different.
LGPE is a good game that leans into the experimental side. And I think it's a good game for that, it has merit to it, and just as I wouldn't say, throw away Mario 2 or Zelda 2 which are both vastly different than their predecessors from their respective canons, I can't say I think the Pokemon franchise would be better off without LGPE. At a minimum, without LGPE there wouldn't be PLA, and without either it'd be longer until we get something like SV.
I just want to hear more about why you enjoy the Pokémon Let's Go series the most. I'm just interested in learning about how someone can enjoy something so horrible, which might give me a new perspective on the matter.
Then you might want to read what I said more closely because I explicitly said SV are my favorite games in the franchise and that LGPE aren't even games I'd necessarily recommend. They're not the games I enjoy the most.
Either way, the answer is simple: different people have different tastes and just because you think something's horrible it doesn't mean other people think the same thing. There is nothing more to understand or say here.
Like, how are the Sinnoh remakes "bland and dispensable?"
Because they don't bring something new in the way that other remakes did. They're faithful to a fault in a way that doesn't serve it well, and they're faithful to something that's not that far away from the current time so it's not even like it smoothed a lot of warts or something like that.
In fact, by introducing controversial mechanics like forced Exp Share, affection mechanics and the lack of Platinum add-ons, a lot of people felt that their overall experience was worse. The graphical change was, in my opinion, poorly done, unimaginative at best, and ridiculous at worse (see floating snakes and scale issues).
With the advent of Pokemon Home and the later release of PLA 2 months later, even the argument of "well, at least it will make more Pokemon available without having to resort to hardware that's 2 generations old" fell flat.
(And these are all things I have said before in this very thread)
While I think RBY are still good and fun games in the context of my niche subculture, I would still say FRLG is the definitive Kanto experience for general audiences (with LGPE being a diversion I think is worthwhile seeing at least once, even if not necessarily playing it).
I can't say the same about BDSP. I still think Platinum is the definitive Sinnoh experience and would say BDSP is a decent alternative if you don't have access to Platinum.
