I was more thinking of the N64 and GameCube games (Stadium 1&2, Colloseum, and XD Gale of Darkness) when referencing older games with poor graphics specifically. All four of those games were graphically inferior to other titles on the same consoles.

However, every single release has been plagued by bugs that can result in completely corrupted save data, softlocks, and a wide variety of other unexpected behaviors. Major examples being MissingNo and the other glitch pokemon, bad eggs, a wide variety of exploitable, but potentially save corrupting bugs like the infinite item glitches in gens 1-3, and a whole host of bugs that break how moves are supposed to work in battle.

Hell, shinies were originally a graphical bug in gen 2.

I don’t disagree that the graphics could and probably should have been better. I do disagree with the idea that it’s anything more than a minor annoyance with no meaningful impact on the game.

However, regardless of what I think about it, my point was that at this point in the franchise, Gamefreak, the Pokemon Company, and Nintendo have demonstrated repeatedly since the very first game that optimization, stability, graphical fidelity, and any semblance of good development practices are not something they’re willing to commit to. Expecting that to change at this point is unreasonable and continuing to complain about it is demonstrably unproductive and just introduces pointless negativity into the pokemon community.

Because graphics are the most important part of a game?

If the games are fun to play who cares if the graphics are bad? Scarlet and Violet were the best pokemon games since P:LA and that was the best since Gen 5.

Based on the limited information we’ve gotten about ZA there’s no reason as of yet to doubt that it won’t be comparable to P:LA and S&V in terms of enjoyability.

Complaining about the graphics of pokemon games or the bugginess of pokemon games is like complaining about CoD being an FPS or Assassin’s Creed having traversable terrain or Souls-likes being hard. At this point it’s a staple of the franchise with 40 games between the mainline games and major spinoffs establishing a trend of the games being thoroughly buggy messes and/or having shit graphics. There is absolutely no reason to expect any of that to change and constantly hearing complaints about it with every new game is getting fucking old.