Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
I don't really agree. Yes, the target demographic of Pokemon is young children, which is precisely why the games are very shallow on the surface. They want someone who's as young as perhaps 6 or 7 to be able to play through the story without getting hit with difficulty spikes they cannot surmount (which also brings into question the resistance against voice-acting since some kids at that age still can't read, or have limited reading comprehension, but whatever). But to circle back to that oh-so-subtle statement I made about "on the surface," that doesn't mean the depth and complexity doesn't exist.

Meanwhile, FFXIV, a game that has a target demographic of people who at least can purchase a subscription fee, so at minimum 18 years or older, is directly erasing depth and removing it from the game. Job design is being demolished at every turn to make the gameplay experience simple by force. Pokemon would would be more analogous to Heavensward. Because for as much as Heavesnward has a reputation of being the most complex that job design has ever been, nearly nothing in the game demanded you engage with that complexity at that level.

Similarly, in Pokemon, you can EV train your Pokemon. You can Breed perfect IV Pokemon. You can seek out Pokemon with hidden abilities. These are all things that you have the option to do even though nothing in the main story asks you to do it. Does that not sound similar to Heavensward FFXIV? Or even Stormblood?

Endwalker would be like Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee, games that explicitly removed many different aspects of Pokemon's complexity. Abilities? Gone. Mega Evolution? Gone. Like 80% of the Pokedex? Gone. Sound familiar?
All of tose things existed, but could you walk up to anyone back then and talk to them about that or did everyone who played pokemon, or even remotely knew about it just see it as a kids game? The point is rather simple, Game Freak doesn't market all of that or talk about it. they just sell cute pokemon and maybe one big competitive feature that most people won't think twice about. Like SE, Gamefreak sells simplicity to a fault. It's semantics to talk about the rest when again, everything else about pokemon is agressively niche, the wider audience isn't losing out on much for not playing into those things like how we're losing out if the majority of people keep refusing to acknowledge how XIV works and functions at it's core.

The inital sales of a single player game matters more then the people who stick around for official tournaments. So the children matter more. With an MMO, long term subs matter more then launch day numbers, so this is a bigger issue with XIV selling simplicity like Pokemon.