Pokemon has involuntarily been turned into a social experiment about confirmation bias and Stockholm syndrome. I hope some sociology or psychology researcher is studying this shit, I know I would.
If this game had been shown for ANY other even slightly relevant franchise, it would have already been bashed into the ground and minced to atoms by fans and onlookers alike.
Instead, on YT it has an overwhelming positive rating, on Reddit posts saying this is the best thing ever to happen to Pokemon are tens of thousands of votes in the positive, and every criticism of any kind is immediately swept under the rug by dozens of people under the guise of "Bu-but they are at least doing something different!".
This is scary. Legitimately scary. It's the ultimate proof that hundreds of thousands of people, most of which in their late teens or older and a lot grown-ass adults, will completely shut down their critical thinking if they are pre-conditioned strongly enough to accept something as good, even something as apparently trivial and optional in their lives as a video game.
This franchise has officially transcended quality judgement and traditional market offering, it's now for all intents and purposes a decentralized cult of personality.
This post is legitimately hysterical and dumb so let me try and bring you back to Earth (can you imagine yourself giving this explanation of a competitor's success in a business meeting? "bu bu it's a cult of personality!!" You'd be fired.)
The difference between pokemon (even more than other nintendo franchises) is that the IP completely transcends the games, so the fans care about the IP regardless of the games' quality. This leads to this "at least it isn't total shit" type of response you're talking about.
An analogous comparison would be dragon ball Z. The games are almost always crap, but when they reach the level of "decent" fans go wild. As a DBZ fan I'd much rather play Budokai 3 than any Tekken game, because it brings so much pleasure to get to experience my beloved IP in "acceptable" form.
A contrasting example would be Starcraft. Nobody gives a flying shit about Starcraft outside of it being an awesome game, because Blizzard is a horrible steward of its IPs and can't achieve any level of "emotional consistency" with its fans like Pokemon can. So once a game is either bad or no longer respects the IP, people stop caring and the IP is totally dead. See Starcraft 2: good game, but it raped the IP, so that whole franchise is dead.
Mario and Zelda are in between Pokemon/DBZ and stuff like Starcraft/TLoS/GoW/whatever AAA multiplat. They have some emotional weight to their IPs but they absolutely do not transcend the games. If Nintendo made 3 absolutely crappy mainline mario games in a row that disrespected the IP (think "Advance Wars: Days of Ruin") the franchise would be dead in the water.
In summary, if you have to explain what is happening here to an adult, this is how you do it: "Game Freak can release low-quality pokemon 'games' because they have always respected their IP and their fans' attachment to the IP with every release, even if the game itself is objectively of relatively low quality. The emotional bond a pokemon fan has to the IP means they are much more forgiving of flaws in the actual software."
Respect your IPs!
