@dipset I do recommend the first, which should be available on Steam or Playstation with the DLC bundled in now for pretty cheap. Check it out next Steam sale or whatever. Only thing you might not like about it is you can miss a jump and fall far back down to the beginning of a stage, but I like that because it adds stakes.

@DMCMaster Honestly, the Gen 3 rivals are nice too, but yeah they've really forced the niceness over time. Least SwSh has Bede though. Check out the Gen 5 games first. BW2 actually has the most interesting rival in the entire Series in my opinion. HeartGold / SoulSilver are great Remakes too if you can get your hands on those. Gen 4 is a bit hard to go back to now, but hopefully Remakes will be soonish, and hopefully they won't suck like the Gen 3 Remakes did. I personally think Pokemon XY had alot of cool stuff and great ideas going for it, but people seem to view it pretty negatively because parts feel unfinished, and it was the start of leaning too hard into Gen 1 nostalgia pandering, but you might like those games. Ignoring ORAS since they're Remakes, Sun and Moon is where I feel the Series started to freefall in quality, that it has yet to recover from. SwSh even fixed some of the problems of Sun and Moon, believe it or not.

Now if you still want a Pokemon fix, what I'd instead recommend is checking out the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Series since you've missed all of that. Switch has a different but good Remake of the first games called Rescue Team DX that'd make a good entry point. Explorers of Sky on the DS is still thought to be the best game in the Series if you can get a copy of that. Skip the WiiWare ones and Gates to Infinity as those are missteps, but if you still have a working 3DS, I can definitely recommend Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon on that, although that game is best enjoyed after all the others given it is full of references. If not PMD, there's also the upcoming New Pokemon Snap that might turn out a fun romp. There's also a wealth of interesting Main Series Romhacks out there if you're willing to dive into that world. I'd recommend the Spaceworld '97 one as a start since it features the scrapped Gen 2 beta designs, so new official Pokemon designs you might not have seen before.

Beyond the games, I can also HIGHLY recommend the Pokemon Anime. It has only gone up in quality since Gen 3 times as the games have gone down. Even though the Dub isn't ideal, due to missing the original background Soundtrack and inferior Voice Acting, that is available on Netflix. Both Sun and Moon and the new Series called Journeys in the west have great Pokemon vibes, just with different formulas than the old Anime. The movies on the other hand have been hit or miss, mostly miss, but one newer one I'd recommend is The Power of Us.

Hopefully something in there to scratch your itch.

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The Last of Us Part II but everyone is sick of hearing takes about that and already know the reasons, so I'll say...
Pixeljunk Eden 2. Even though there's some arcade fun to be had with the tweaks to 1's structure and controls, it just overall felt like way more shallow of an experience. It is the kind of game that feels like it should've been posed as a subtitle spinoff rather than a sequel.

If we're being more broad with the concept, I still enjoyed the heck out of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered, but how much they bungled the whole caravaning together aspect, among many other things, really threw a big heavy wet blanket over my enjoyment of it that I found quite hard to escape from. People already want to not like the game for various reasons, so it really didn't need all that on top of those, and the whole thing just made it impossible to recommend the game to others, even though I want more people to fall in love with that game.

Honorable Mention Disappointments: Animal Crossing New Horizons not getting the Updates I wanted, Nintendo abandoning Super Mario Maker 2, Ubisoft (nuff said), Ghost of Tsushima (but it is fine, because Sekiro exists), Paper Mario moving even further away from the traditional Partner Based Battle System, Genshin Impact's Atrocious Gacha Rates (VS the otherwise fantastic game it is), Super Mario 3D All Stars missing Galaxy 2, everything around Halo Infinite, Age of Calamity's Framerate, Bugsnax's Story going exactly where you'd expect it to, and no Controller Revisions released for either the Joycon or the Switch Pro Controller while everyone is dealing with Drift Issues

@el-shmiablo No, because people act like GameFreak is just slacking, so I expect others to have examples of who they should be emulating, but the truth is that there's nobody even attempting near the same scale and schedule, because even what they're doing now is nuts to begin with. Although this move to DLC seems a bit healthier overall since they can stagger out waves that way. Really just sick of this shit coming up every time something new comes out "that looks so much better than Pokemon". Remember Temtem? Nobody gives a crap about it anymore, even though right before launch everyone heralded it the Pokemon slayer. Oh, and about that launch, it launched Early Access. Even Temtem, which didn't have the same media franchise time constraints of Pokemon couldn't just release the whole scope of their game at once.

As for New Pokemon Snap, the word right now is it has over 200 Pokemon in it. Still a fraction of what's in Sword and Shield, which makes sense given the animations for each in New Pokemon Snap are more elaborate, albeit fewer and who knows how long that game has been in development. GameFreak can't make everyone happy, but they're trying, even though people want to get super toxic and act like they're not.

@miserableperson Again, I really don't want to get into this again and in the news topic, but they are. They legitimately are expanding the team with every game. The core team sized doubled between Sun and Moon and Sword and Shield. You can only bring new people in and train them so fast, and there's only so many available.

@DIPSET From my understanding, that was a test game to work with the Switch hardware, but I can agree with you on this point. In general, the content of the main adventures, both when it comes to cutscenes and just interesting areas with interesting NPCs you meet has nosedived since Gen 6. Sword and Shield basically had no "dungeons", unless you count the pretty short Tanglewood Grove or whatever it is called before the Fairy Town, and that I do take issue with, but it also seems like in Sword and Shield's case, they stuffed the Wild Area in late during development to appease people wanting a big open area and had to cut back elsewhere.

Really? We're doing this again? Go ahead and point to a developer doing a better job animating 900 monsters doing 800 moves in a two year developer cycle, because you know, fuck crunch, but those lazy GameFreak devs aren't crunching hard enough.

@jdincinerator You say that, but I've definitely had friends who have broken controllers (among other things) after getting frustrated at a game.

@DMCMaster In Nintendo's press release, this new form was dubbed "God-Slayer Bowser".

Edit: Just Kidding? Apparently, that was made up and falsely spread? Maybe?

@Axel Honestly, I think this is going to be very short. Some people are even predicting it might be rogue-like in ways for replay value with course elements randomly rearranging, but it could also just be one short little thing. However, this new version of 3D World also has ONLINE COOP for the old campaign, so if that ends up running better than Super Mario Maker 2 Online, it'll be worth the buy for that alone.

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This looks absolutely insane.

@jdincinerator I mean there's ridiculous gaming challenges I've given up on before like Hollow Knight's last DLC where the last Pantheon is beating every boss in the game, some of them powered up, all in a row, without checkpoints, but that seems different from the title of this topic.