Is it still possible for games to have that same feel of adventure that early pokemon games had?

Strategy guides existed. I remember renting the chrono trigger one endlessly when I first played it.

No, because you are not a kid anymore.
You're smarter now.
You've played countless of adventure games.
You've seen countless of adventures in movies.
You know the tropes, you know the clichés.
You can easily reduce a game to numbers.
You understand the how the AI is coded.
You know how to effectively and efficiently speed through the game in a systematic way.
You're an adult, you can see through the illusions of adventure in almost everything, and the games you can't are few and far apart.
Your childhood is over.

This is literally a hallway.

You'll never fill that hole. Sentinels of the starry sky game closest to me.

see >No, because you are not a kid anymore.

THIS THIS AND ONLY THIS
We cant even grasp how Fortnite feels in the mind of a 7 or 8 year old for example.
This was us playing Pokemon Red,Ruby,Diamond or whatever gen you played as a little kid

Let's organize what the old pokemon games have that the new ones couldn't reproduce:
>Small screen size, meaning the world would seem bigger and requires you to move around to see everything
>Simple animations and graphics, meaning players could fill in the games with their own imagination, potentially making the end product a lot more fun and engaging that even intended
>Music, considering weaker hardwares and shit, had to be crafted with melody in mind since more instruments weren't available to construct more complex songs, this creates catchy music all over
>Difficulty, older games were harder so mystery would appear, higher level wild pokemon could kill off your unhealed party and you were all kids playing it, you knew shit, so the games had the challenge aura around them which gave purpose to everything else you did
>True secrets, lack of tutorials make the games less like a linear slog and more like a "discover the actual linear path with few clues"

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Its always been like that. Only now with more text and time wasting animations.

Dev here, I know all the shit about games, already shipped a game with my team.
I still feel the adventure when playing BoTW, Dark Souls (and sequels), Dragon Quest (most of them) and recently with Bloodstained. Don't blame the players, it has nothing to do with knowing about the true nature of games. Games should always make you immersed in them in a way you can FORGET their true nature.

This is part of it. Also, as you grow, you build a library of conventions and expectations that make fundamental discoveries unlikely. Most of these system driven software experiences aren't wholesale new to us like they'd have been in our formative years. You may still find that sense of novelty through exploring very different genres.

On Pokemon and similar sorts of games in particular, I'm realizing that one of the transitions that's slowly been made is from the metaphor for a whole region or location in simplified geography and character designs being inherently undermined by the progression to more conventional character proportions, architecture, and layouts. It doesn't help that things likely feel smaller because of that associative shift.

No, because everything is spoiled on the internet weeks before release.

Your mileage varies with regard to immersion. While I also still feel this with a handful of games, I don't dismiss the role of expectation and experience in the sense of novelty, adventure, and the like. Those games you felt that way about may very well not feel that way to other players who are more actively aware or indulgent. Some people can't suspend their awareness and others still have different levels of experience and expectation. You can also still feel immersed but recognize that, relative to experiences from formative years, the game you're playing doesn't really approach the degree of affect you recall.

lots of shitty rpgs and action games that never got much attention and still have a rumors section

I also develop games in my spare time. I love all the games you just listed there, and that's exactly why I said "few and far apart". How a game manages to make adults forget it's all numbers and planned out by a mind that can do the exact same things yours can, and immerse them, yes that is the art of making good adventure game.

I'm responding to OP though, and I played Pokemon Yellow for the first time today, I wouldn't be immersed as I was as 7 year old kid. A game like BoTW and Bloodborne vastly different, in the same way bread-and-butter Marvel Movie #45 is not the same as Pulp Fiction, Joker, or The Godfather, etc.

Yeah, the current technological forefront is more of a spectacle and a more solid basis for our expectations to be subverted or played down than most of the old yester-year software.

Digimon World 1 is the only game that has ever felt like a real dangerous adventure. Try it, you may like it.

>Some people can't suspend their awareness and others still have different levels of experience and expectation.
This is why long-time gaming isn't for everyone. If it was, Remakes and Remasters wouldn't be the top shit being produced these days. People are less likely to get into something new these days that doesn't remind them of their childhood for the reasons you explained.
It's probably an outcome of human behaviour in general but I have no idea how culture repeats itself throughout time, I can only observe movies and games being remade left and right while I don't remember that being as commonplace 20 or so years ago.

Not really? Good example being the march to Fuschia City. You may want to go South from Lavender or West from Celadon but you can't because a wild Snorlax decided to take a nap on the roads leading South. The only clue you get is that the Pokemon is sleeping. If you talk to the NPCs in Lavender they'll tell you that Mr. Fuji has a Flute that can wake sleeping pokemon. But Mr. Fuji is currently being held hostage by Team Rocket in the Pokemon Tower. So the game pushes you towards Celadon where you have a couple of options, beat the gym leader or clear the secret hideout in the Casino, which will reward you with the Silph Scope to identify ghost pokemon. Now at this point you can clear Saffron or continue forward to Lavender to clear the Silph Tower and get the Pokeflute. Now the game only tells you the purpose of the flute and lets you put the pieces together on how to get past the obstacle. More than that a savvy player will realize the Flute can be used to cure sleep status mid battle, you never have to but Awakening ever again. You, the player, solved the problem the game presented you with.

Modern Pokemon isn't like this. If you took the exact same situation and translated it into Gen 8 then a random NPC would stop you before you could reach the docks to say
>You can't pass, we don't want to disturb the sleeping Pokemon. You should go have fun in Celadon City instead
And then Mr. Fuji would say
>Thank you for saving me. Here's this pokeflute! You should use it on the sleeping pokemon on the docks. But be careful it's really strong, here let me heal your team even though the pokemon center is literally in my backyard

I think it's a notable part of the human mind. We learn so much so fast in youth. The formative memories and moments and information are vivid and become a fundamental component of the lens we view the world with.

I'd suppose the nostalgia fanbase is sizable enough to represent the value needed to justify those projects. They also have the advantage of considering that the foundation content did something that resonated that might be leveraged in a modern context with the right adjustments.

There's something serious about imagination during a playthrough and how some games just remove the need for the "mental middleman" (such as RDR2 with its so down-to-earth gameplay) and how some others emphasize that with intentional hiding of information (such as the level design telling a story, characters saying nothing about it, the player being the only one capable of filling the gaps and figuring stuff out)
Games have several ways to make them not stand out as big GAMES like whenever a match ends you're reminded imediately it was a game, no matter the genre. Same thing on forced tutorials, cutscenes with big ass SKIP CUTSCENE button in the middle of the screen, overly arbitrary stuff like regenerating health or infinite bullets. There's a thin line between JUST A GAME and an immersive game that can take you somewhere else entirely for a while.

unironically clover is the closest i've felt to pokemon feeling like an adventure.

I loved playing Clover. It reminded me that I still actually like Pokemon. It's Game Freak that I don't like

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The imagination thing is a part of my reasoning on the 'metaphor' design in an earlier comment: how the old limited visuals meant that players were compensating on their own terms. That and the technological standard of a given player back then meant that you could paint the picture to be far grander than it may truly be. The heavily established visual and mechanical systems take away from that opportunity to author and bolster aspects of your experience latently. Another major hang up is that the scale, density, and placement of assets can only inflate so much in spite of the new realism of the assets, making the limit of the sandbox far more jarring when relevant.

>game come out
>everything is datamined and leaked a week before it's even released

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>I still feel the adventure when playing BoTW
I think BoTW is an interesting case as it felt amazing before i completed the game. I got a few hours of post-game completionism before the systems just fell apart for me.
I like video games that do this style of story telling. I think it should always be a B plot though. The A plot should be pretty easy to understand but an ambiguous greater narrative is always nice.
People go crazy over stuff like gaster from toby fox's rpgs so i'm surprised this isn't done more often.

The mystique of your looming confrontation is a very valuable thing that unfortunately disappears when you fight Ganon. I'd suggest not doing that for new players until they feel that they've gotten their fill.

>Less hand holding
>allow non linear progression(out of order gyms)
>Add more hidden pokemon
>Add more optional puzzles with cryptic solutions
>Make the rival an actual rival
>Design the world as an ecosystem full of monsters, not a giant theme park petshop

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Not him and tangentially related but are there games that use their mechanics to enhance the story. Because I really like little things like how in FF7 Cloud is able to get the jump on Sephiroth because he was carrying an item that allows the one carrying it to sneak up on an enemy from behind. Or, since OP brought up pokemon, how GSC illustrated the rival mellowing out with his Golbat evolving into Crobat, which it only does when it's friendly towards its owner

For me it's like magic. Some games hit that note just right and I'll sink right into the world and see the hours pass by (Dark Souls, for example). Then I played Nioh (1) and I just couldn't get into it, even though I beat the game, I just never got invested in it.

One of the things I hate about games is when I'm able to make a "checklist" of all the next 10 things I need to do. I played Outer Worlds recently and I always had this to do: [1] go to town and talk to everyone and exhaust the dialogue (get all quests) [2] Explore the buildings briefly to see if I trigger something [3[ Do side quests and optional stuff [4] while doing side quests also visit points of interest on the map [5] go back to ship and do companion missions [6] do main story quest when all else is exhausted. It was like that every second, every planet, every time, and I barely even remember anything about the game.

I spend a lot of time on thinking about how I can avoid this with my own game design, but it's hard.

Wild area was such a good idea that they found a way to fuck up

>we allowed players to run into dangerously powerful pokemon early
>but they can't catch them because that would break the game
>even though we already gave a system in place for that one thing and we could just apply it to player caught pokemon

not until
>boxart legendary is entirely optional
>there is no "save the world" plot, only you being a Pokemon Trainer

I genuinely felt this with BotW, although BotW was also my first Zelda Game, not sure if that factors in anything.

It's not easy though. You've played so many fucking games in your life it'll take something truly special to make you feel like a kid again.

I primarily just like how it handles experience. The worst part of pokemon was that optimal way to play the game was to just use your starter and have it one shot everything. I am actively gimping myself by splitting my exp.
Clover's exp system actually encourages you to have more than 6 pokemon you can swap out for gym fights your team is greatly under prepared for.

I get that exp share helps out a tonne in gen 6 but the game becomes trivial garbage after the 2nd gym and the entire experience becomes worthless. I avoided gen 8 and clover has only cemented how mismanaged the series has been since gen 6.

I intentionally refused to get LGPE and Gen 8. LGPE because I wasn't interested in yet another Kanto game and Gen 8 because the fuckery in that game became too much for me. And this is coming from someone invested in a series that sells 2 copies of the same game even though the premise for doing that became obsolete the moment wifi became commonplace. Nowadays I just play romhack and I gotta say I found more enjoyment in Clover than I ever did in Sun and Moon.

But more to the point Clover made me realize that you absolutely can have a good pokemon game. The actual core of what pokemon is, is good. As a matter of fact other JRPGs would kill for what Pokemon has. The only ones who don't realize it is Game Freak themselves