Best recent Pokemon game? (Gens 8 and 9)

Legends Arceus is legendary

I have only played Z-A so I don’t think it’s fair for me to vote

They are all pretty awful in their own way.

Sword and Shield are perhaps the worst. They are the culmination of dexit and the beginning of the mandatory exp share, though to be fair the frog started boiling in the 3DS generations with the addition of exp. share and the removal of dex entries for non-native Pokémon. The story was virtually non-existent, the wild area was garbage and the routes, while pretty at times, were linear and boring. It also introduced the baffling decision to animate voiced cutscenes without voice acting, which is the embarrassing staple of every Switch-era Pokémon game to drag you out of whatever intrigue the stories might have.

Pokémon Legends Arceus was an interesting premise and actually showed some innovation, but played more like an alpha build than a finished product. The controls change when you mount a Pokémon, the environments are terribly textured and look awful, and the human characters, Pokémon and environments all look like they were taken from different games and seem to use different lighting engines. The narrative supposedly takes place in a time before catching and training Pokémon was commonplace, yet Gamefreak cannot conceive of any other monster recruitment method for their game, so you hilariously throw wooden, steam-powered Pokéballs like some cheesy parody skit.

Scarlet and Violet ignored what little promise appeared in PLA and tried to plaster a typical linear Pokémon adventure over an open world, which still looked terrible, ran worse and now compromised virtually all interior spaces. The bugs are infamous, but even if it ran flawlessly at 60fps the abysmal design would remain.

Z-A confined you to one city and yet retained all the Switch era Pokémon problems. I prefer turn based combat to real time, so that aspect may be a personal preference rather than bad design, but it didn't really appeal to me. And of course it cordoned off a bunch of DLC before the game even launched that took place in the same city environment. Remember to buy a Switch 2, upgrade to the Switch 2 version of the game and buy all the DLC before you can get the full experience.

So this becomes not a question of which is "best", but which I consider the least worst. And honestly I don't know. They all share a lot of terrible traits while being uniquely awful in their own right.

Winds and Waves better be a substantial course correction, otherwise I think this series is essentially dead and just limping along on memory of past glory.

No, earlier Pokémon games are good. That doesn't mean they are flawless or not worthy of criticism. But the Switch era has been an abysmal decline in quality for the series.

Calling one game (or era of games) bad doesn't mean I think every other game is perfect.

Finding a flaw in a game doesn't make it necessarily bad.

You have to evaluate each one as a whole.

What's wrong with that?

I have been a fan of the series since its inception. Why shouldn't I play them and expect to enjoy them? If I criticised them without playing them, I bet you'd be saying "how can you criticise them? You haven't even played them!"

I am not a fan because I mindlessly love every game for the brand name alone. I loved the series for the quality of the experience. If that quality declines, I will criticise it.

Criticism is how any product improves, be it an artistic endeavour like a video game, or something as simple or utilitarian as a pencil.

Shying away from criticism, or sycophantically praising them no matter what, is how game series stagnate or decay. I want them to avoid such decay, but more than that, I want them to improve.

Also, you must be new here if me writing an "essay" is remarkable to you.