Do you get the impression Gen VI was cut short? Looking back there’s a lot about it that seems unfinished. I’m not the first to think that Zygarde should have had its own game, but the Gen VI events for Diancie, Hoopa and Volcanion are really underwhelming; all they unlock in XY/ORAS is a bit of extra dialogue. Feels like a lot of wasted potential. The fact that Gen VII only has two event Pokemon (and hackers haven’t found a Marshadow event in S/M yet) makes me think this gen will be short too.
A little, yeah. Mostly what I think is strange is that they built such a unique subsystem for Zygarde with so many interesting little features, and then never really did anything with it. Clearly some of it was already planned when they produced X and Y; Thousand Arrows and Thousand Waves are both in the code for the generation VI games but were never made obtainable, and Zygarde’s Pokédex data hints at a really important role that it ought to have in the conflict of X and Y. I feel like maybe Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby might have taken more resources and development time than originally anticipated and sapped them away from whatever plans Game Freak might have had for those loose ends – they did a great deal more than the first two generations of remakes did, after all. And that was certainly worth it, because Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby are fantastic games. I can imagine it being difficult to do all that, and make a “sequel” to X and Y, within the 2 ½ – 3 year window that they seem to like for the length of a generation. Sun and Moon feel more self-contained to me (but I still haven’t properly thought through them in detail), so if I’m right they could be anticipating a similarly exhausting development process for a putative Diamond/Pearl remake and planning accordingly. All of that is speculation on my part though; I don’t know a lot about the practicalities of game design, or have any special insight into Game Freak’s work flow.
Pokémaniacal 