BareKnuckleRoo wrote:
Monsters that become your buds by encouraging you to wander into and rip them out of their habitat in the wild and force them to spend the rest of their lives encased in small plastic balls as your personal pet collections to be forced to battle for your personal amusement and pumped full of drugs to boost their stats so you can gain the crown of "Best at forcing wild animals to engage in bloodsport for human pleasure".
Why, yes, that's completely in the same moral vein as a game about beating up a mafia boss and his gang members, how foolish of me not to have realized! :V
Kids who thought Pokémon was the best GB RPG were missing out on the joy of chainsawing a megalomaniacal god to death.
Pokemon won out over a lot of other GB RPGs because the designs were cool, you had a cast of over a hundred possible party members with a hundreds of abilities, and you could battle your friends.
Having multiplayer does a lot for the series. Many people mostly play it for the multiplayer at this point... although a lot of people just play Pokemon Showdown or something instead, since playing on cartridge is super slow [building and designing an optimal team takes AGES vs just picking shit from a dropdown box and being ready to go, much faster feedback loop to figure out what's worthwhile or not, much faster feedback loop to responding to new shit, much faster loop to just playing the game at all].
Pokemon streamlines a lot of the RPG experience, too. It's pretty impressive how much less clunky it is than many other GB RPGs, to the point where hilariously little has changed from game to game all the way up to the modern era. It's pick up and play in a way that many other RPGs aren't, where you're trying to remember what to do, where to go, etc.
Of course, the issue with that is that apart from more monsters and moves [a constant upwards trend until extremely recently], minor mechanics changes [abilities, physical/special damage determined per move instead of per move type], and quality of life shit [not needing specific moves on a character to break rocks or cut trees or fast travel], the games are extremely interchangable.
As for the plot... the games largely do cop out on the nitty gritty of what you're doing. The plot of Pokemon Black/White is about a guy who runs an organization that's against humans capturing Pokemon, but you can guess how that turns out.
It's regularly implied that Pokemon willingly join humans so they can get stronger and beat up other Pokemon, but now that sounds like the humans are a society of enablers.

The stories have gotten into pretty standard world shaking RPG fare too -- Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald is about dealing with guys who want to reshape the land/sea ratio of the planet, Diamond/Pearl/Platinum is about stopping a guy who wants to become the god of his own world, X/Y is about stopping a guy who wants to use an ancient superweapon to genocide the "useless" people [which makes more sense in Y version because he uses the bird that represents death instead of deer that represents life like in X]. Yeah, you're still doing the same "get 8 badges, become Champion" thing each time, but it's a framework to tell another story at this point.
tl;dr: the series is mediocre in a bunch of ways and the plot is basic and glosses over a bunch of shit about what you're doing, but it still has a few key things that stand out, namely being very streamlined, having a large cast [there are almost 900 Pokemon to date], and having multiplayer.