Pokemon enjoys its sustained success in large part due to its accessibility and approachability. Despite Pokemon's depth, which has enabled it to sustain a large competitive following and a far larger online community, its turn-based, menu-based nature has lent itself well to enabling children, the series' primary demographic, to play, enjoy, and understand these games.
If the mainline Pokemon games were to adopt real-time combat in place of its current system, that decision would raise the barrier to entry for these games considerably.
In addition, to expect real-time combat in a Pokemon game, you have to expect one of two things -
- that the developers of such a game would animate, design, and balance over 800 individual creatures, each with their own quirks and attributes, for an intricate action combat system, in a way that's balanced, and which enables fair and methodical competitive play (a core tenet of the series as it exists today) as well as support for ancillary features like breeding
- that the developers of such a game would opt to omit several hundred potential fan favorite creatures from the very framework of the game in order to achieve that vision within a reasonable scope, thereby arbitrarily walking back other core tenets of the series, like the ability to transfer Pokemon up from other games, build up long-standing dexes/collections, and breed traits from other evolutionary lines into your Pokemon.
It's so much work for little gain. I don't think that game can't exist in some measure - like I said in my last post, I think a remake of, like, Red and Blue, with 151 Pokemon, in that style, would be pretty cool. I don't think it's feasible or sensible for that to be a mainline game, though. As a spinoff series, something meant to be it's own thing, targeting slightly older or more adventurous Pokemon fans, sure.
