If modern Pokemon weren't attached to the brand already they'd be massive flops on their own. The brand is safe and was built on a monumentally sturdy foundation so lots of the new mons can be disposable if they aren't hits and become "icons" if they are

The anime did most of the heavy lifting. A combination of simplicity breeding creativity by having the Game Freak staff need to design unique monsters on Gameboy hardware and a genuinely good anime that shilled those monsters to kids. By the time the anime got bad, the games actually improved enough to take over from there and be the main focus for marketing. But really as long as people want a Pikachu toy, Pokemon isn't going fucking anywhere

A big failure of any other monster games is they can't do cute right. It's not just boys you need to appeal to, Pokemon has some of the best cute monsters in the genre. People want merch of those, not just the big tough dragons or action furries. It should be appealing to a normal person, not the "I wanna fuck that" crowd because their standards are extremely fucking low

Is the Diagaea 7 Switch 2 edition still at 100% stock? Would hope that this really blows up in NISAs face.