For the record I was one of the only people to correctly predict a second pair of Kanto remakes was going to come after USUM vs. the Sinnoh remakes many were expecting. I'll admit I was on the Z train but there's strong evidence to suggest the game was in develop for a 2015 release but was scrapped so they could instead focus on their 20th anniversary release, Sun and Moon, for a 2016 release. Anyone who said Let's Go Johto after SwSh was simply incorrect, because the last Sinnoh games came out prior to the last Johto games (DP in 2006 vs. HGSS in 2009). Logically speaking, Sinnoh remakes were up next on the remake release schedule once they came out with LGPE, which was the first game featuring Kanto since 2004 with FRLG. The remakes go in literal release order, and WHEN exactly in a generation they come out is certainly up for debate, but WHICH remake is up next is not a debatable. Case in point: LGPE, which I correctly predicted, was the Kanto remake that was up next, since Kanto's last paired games came out after Hoenn's last paired games, being Ruby and Sapphire. If we go by paired release order RS was in 2002, FRLG was in 2004, DP was in 2006, HGSS was in 2009, BW was in 2010. The last two are the important notable ones, history repeated itself with us getting a Kanto game after a Hoenn game (LGPE after ORAS), and once again by getting a Sinnoh game after a Kanto game (BDSP after LGPE). You must see the pattern by now. Johto game immediately after Sinnoh.
You could be right, I never said it was likely, I said it was something that, in my opinion, would be the most logical step, given recent events and the community response to poor graphical fidelity/performance, it might be safer to go back to "what worked" and I feel like they really captured the fun charming Pokemon aesthetic with Let's Go, I understand that's subjective but my initial statement should've made that obvious. Also, saying there's better looking games... is certainly an opinion lol, but not a very popular one. I'm sorry but if you look at shots of LGPE side-by-side with every game since, LGPE is just leagues more pleasing to look at and the community's overall response with graphical performance suggests that this is a somewhat popular opinion. Whether it's on here, or r/Pokemon, lots of posts about how good LGPE looked graphically. I'm pretty sure the average player of Pokemon games would agree that a game that looks as good as LGPE but with all the modern features and quality of life updates the main series has, as well as as much content stuffed in it, would be damn near the perfect game. If you gave me an LGPE that was as ambitious as PLA or SV try to be content-wise, it would've probably been my favorite Pokemon game ever even if it was just a content-filled Kanto remake, this is literally what made HGSS such a popular game that players to this day place on a pedestal, HGSS to this day is in most people's Top 5 Pokemon games and high up on tier lists etc. was just how much there was in the game, it was a little old school and familiar with it being set in Johto with Pokemon people were familiar to, but it embraced the technological side of Gen 4 perfectly, was fully-compatible with those games with no restrictions, LGPE tried to be a Gen 1 game that looks good but that just created a game that LOOKED ambitious because of how good it looked, but ended up lacking content. All I'm saying with reusing LGPE is they have a good opportunity to appeal to both sides of the coin, people that want the graphics to improve and people who want an abundance of content to indulge, by using a popular graphical engine aka the Let's Go engine, but making the games similar to SV content-wise.
BDSP is not at all like LGPE and ORAS, ORAS was a fairly ambitious remake on the levels of HGSS, objectively speaking those games had an incredible amount of overall content and really only catch complaints for no Battle Frontier. LGPE was a literal Gen 1 remake that looked like a modern game, and BDSP was a literal Gen 4 remake but they forgot to try on the graphical side. All people want is a game that can do both, content and graphics, and unfortunately, no game has really met that bar yet on the Switch.
I agree with you on this, I feel like a Legends-style game would always be paired with an aforementioned remake release. So if we do, for example, get 1:1 Johto remakes, a Legends game would follow within a year later. Being able to utilize another studio like ILCA is what makes this possible but I feel like BDSP was just a case of ILCA REAAALLY missing the assignment and somehow neither Game Freak or TPCi saw the problem either so all parties involved were ignorant or incompetent. I think what everyone was expecting was a "Sinnoh but Megas" remake like LGPE, using a recent game engine, the best two available at the time would've been the LGPE engine or the SwSh engine and either could've been adapted into a recreation of Sinnoh and the game would've been 10x more successful. BDSP is not a bad game content-wise, it's just that it's the most visually disgusting game and also feels so disconnected from it's release generation. In the past, remakes always could directly interact with some games in their generation and allow people who got the remakes to play with people who maybe hadn't gotten them. I had this happen a lot as a kid, like when I got SoulSilver and was able to battle and trade with my friend on Platinum. This was true from FRLG all the way up to ORAS but this trend stopped with LGPE not being able to communicate directly with any Gen 7 games. I was willing to look the other way that time because the game wasn't trying to be a Gen 7 game even though it is one, it was trying to be a bridge between GO and the main series, and it accomplished that by having Home and GO connectivity, it was also trying to be a Gen 1 game so it could only directly communicate with itself, fair enough. The problem is they completely missed with BDSP, you can tell any attempt at connectivity with a past game wasn't made since it wasn't even on the same engine. Every remake has borrowed the engine from a game within the past few years, FRLG were built on top of RS, HGSS were built on top of DPPl, ORAS was built on top of XY, LGPE's engine looks like an up-res'd ORAS, and SwSh even looks like an up-res'd USUM and even uses the same animations which was a very talked about topic around the time of SwSh's release. For the record I'm not against the reusing of assets if the assets are good. For example, I'll give SV some credit where it's due, the Pokemon models themselves are stunning, they really worked on them and made them look so nice, being able to see incredibly good textures and more vibrant colors is a huge plus, the problem is they focused so much on the Pokemon that the rest of SV looks like trash. If you used the SV models in LGPE's overworld for a Johto remake it would be one of the greatest games in Pokemon history.
Not true, ORAS had the whole Rayquaza/Deoxys storyline with the Delta Episode, a ton of lore about Rayquaza as well as Groudon and Kyogre present, both of the evil teams in general just received a lot more personality in ORAS than in RSE where they were basically just mirrored versions of each other and had no real difference in personality. ORAS also introduced the DexNav, one of the best catching features in a game to-date, online secret bases and being able to actually turn your base in your own Gym was really nice, a slightly expanded Hoenn Dex including evolutions of Hoenn Pokemon like Roserade or Froslass to spruce up the regional dex a bit, adding these Pokemon to the teams of key characters too, like how Glacia uses a Froslass now. You even see extra cutscenes like the Steven/Wallace interaction hinting at Wallace taking his seat as he did in Emerald, you can compete in contests against Wallace and a new character who serves as a sort-of contest rival, Lisia, you can catch mentions of Brandon and Lucy, two of the Frontier Brains, as well as Scott and his plan to build the Battle Frontier. It really was unfortunate that it didn't include the Battle Frontier and Gym Leader Rematches, although I personally didn't miss Gym Leader Rematches since they were fundamentally easy to win, rematches are only a good idea if they're hard, either battle facility-style like the PWT in BW2, or just literally make their teams level 100, wish Game Freak would stop being hesitant to make trainers who have all level 100 Pokemon who can actually be a challenge to battle. I only want rematches if they're included in one of those two ways, so if they aren't I don't particularly care for them since I'm always going to have an unfair advantage on them and have to forcefully limit or handicap myself in some way to artificially make it a challenge.
The only "pattern" that was broken was the "third version" release. They've experimented heavily with that release since Gen 5, where they did sequels instead of Grey, Gen 6 had one in development that was possibly going to be split into two games according to leftover data present in Home or Bank that refers to a third and fourth Kalos game, hinting that they had at least considered developing a Z game and possibly were going to split it into two games like how "Stars" was basically split into USUM. Gen 7 obviously did a split third version instead of one unified game, and Gen 8 opted to do DLC instead of a third version. Gen 8 also did a "third version" with PLA, only in the sense that it was the third Sinnoh game of the generation following BDSP. That's really the only pattern that has been broken. The remake pattern from FRLG up to BDSP has not been broken, and I don't feel like it will because why would Game Freak turn down free money? It's much easier to remake an existing game than it is to create a brand new one, you have to storyboard the entire thing, make new Pokemon and character designs, an entirely new region, etc. Remakes are probably 100x easier to develop because you just literally detail-for-detail copy the original game but make it look good and include some fresh content or quality of life changes and boom, a top-selling game made with minimal effort. If you want the business logic for why they'll make a Johto remake, that's the reason. It's close to zero-time development compared to a game like SV and will still sell really well simply because it says Pokemon on the box. Of course this could be said for remaking any old game, if I could personally request the development of a new game or games, I'd ask for the scrapped Pokemon Z to be brought to life on the Switch and give us an actually good Kalos game, and likewise, Delta Emerald be developed to expand on what ORAS gave us, include all the Emerald content on top of ORAS content, and serve as the definitive Hoenn game, but I'm biased since Gen 6 was probably one of my favorite generations despite the issues with XY and ORAS, and I saw a lot of potential in both games go to waste and I'm disappointed Z was scrapped since I was very much looking forward to Z at the time.
There is a pretty interesting route with Terastalization they can go with a Johto remake. Instead of remaking GS or HGSS, instead remake Crystal. There is precedence for remaking the third version the second time around, since the second set of Kanto remakes, LGPE, were really just remakes of Yellow split into two. If they go with Crystal as the remade game, they can tie in Terastalization, which has been equated to Crystallization, so it quite literally fits in theme with the name. There's also the fact that there's a leaked
Most of what you said isn't really Game Freak's decision, like when to move to the next system or how many games/generations per system, that has more to do with when Nintendo releases new systems, which isn't something Game Freak has control over, so that's a moot point and I'm not sure why you're bringing that up, they move to a new system whenever it's convenient for them to do so. They had stayed off the Switch for nearly two years so there was probably a lot of internal pressure to put a main series game on the Switch and LGPE was their answer to that. As for when they choose to remake certain games, the only constant has been they either remake the game once it's no longer playable on that system OR in the case of FRLG, because the originals can no longer communicate with current games. That was the basis for why FRLG was developed, it was solely meant to give people access back to their Kanto and Johto favorites, hence the Sevii Islands being a new mini-region that housed a lot of Johto Pokemon. HGSS because GSC were no longer playable on the DS (they were playable on the GBA but couldn't communicate up to Gens 3 or 4). I think the Hoenn remake got delayed for as long as it did because Gen V was still on the DS and the DS (as long as it wasn't the DSi) could still play GBA games aka the Hoenn games. Timeline-wise we could've gotten Hoenn remakes in 2012 or 2013 and it would've been about the 10-year mark since the original release, but I think they did the right thing by waiting for the 3DS. There really was no established pattern until LGPE came out, LGPE closed to look by being the first remake of a region that already had a remake. A big discussion on remake forums for years was that, eventually when they've remade games up to Gen 3, they get to the point where it's been 10+ years since a Kanto game, and may look to remake a remake to reintroduce that region to new fans while also appealing to the nostalgia of old fans. That is the core fundamental reason why remakes are even a thing. If your favorite region is, let's say, Unova, but Game Freak never releases another Unova region, you'd probably be a little salty right, after all, all the Hoenn fans and Kanto fans and even Sinnoh fans are getting remakes of their favorite games, so why shouldn't you. If your favorite region is Johto you're just screwed? It's not logical to think these regions WON'T get remade eventually, and like I said it is comparatively zero-time development compared to storyboarding a new game and designing a map from scratch, vs. just being able to completely reuse old designs and just freshen them up a little.
I always got the vibe that they clearly meant to develop a Battle Tower or even Battle Frontier but ran out of time, you'd have thought they'd at least give us the Battle Tower and Anabel but instead getting the Maison copy-pasted literally felt like something they did with a month before launch because they ran out of time. Makes me hope we get a Delta Emerald game one day on the Switch or Switch Pro or whatever the next system is. PLA proved that a single game release can sell 15 million+ copies which is a first since Yellow, so if done right it'll sell extremely well. It needs to be marketed alongside a Legends: Rayquaza game or whatever. Both BDSP and PLA sold very well because they kinda tied in with one another which was a very good marketing strategy by TPCi and Game Freak. Hoenn is my favorite region though so I'm kinda biased, but as soon as I saw the trailer for Legends: Arceus, I thought to myself "a Hoenn game in the ancient past with the Draconids and the first recorded uses of Mega Evolution etc. would absolutely be fire".
Pokemon is well known for continuing to support systems well into the end of their lifespans. Emerald came out one year after the DS launched, BW2 came out one year after the 3DS launched, and USUM released in the year of the Switch's launch. Basically, main series games are never released in the year of a new console's launch, and I don't know if this will change.
Yeah. They haven't made a game set in the Johto region since 2009, which was 13 years ago (I am not counting the VC releases for this statistic). This gap is larger than the gap between RG and FRLG (8 years), GS and HGSS (10 years) and RS and ORAS (12 years). The longest gap between revisits was between FRLG and LGPE, at 14 years. We've gone only 10 years since we've last seen Unova (in BW2). Johto and Unova are also the only regions that cannot be played in full 3D. Kanto can through LGPE, Hoenn through ORAS, Sinnoh through BDSP, and Kalos-onwards are naturally made in full 3D. Johto is just plainly the most out of date region right now, and as such it is the most deserving of a remake right now.
