I just looked through 8th generation Pokemon due to some nostalgia about the times I was still actively into Pokemon. Basically from the times I first saw Pokemon on tv to the end of 6th generation games. I had this thought "these new Pokemon don't 'feel' like Pokemon to me anymore... meh..." and suddenly I noticed myself criticising myself that I'm too radical/not accepting enough of change. This echoed from the times when I met someone who took grave offense when I said (quite harshly) I don't like the newer generation she did, and it would result in endless arguments for simply having different tastes. The only way to avoid this was just to be very mild and neutral, in other words sometimes lying to her (and myself eventually) instead of just staying true about what I like and dislike.
A long time has passed since then but I've held all this within and compulsively acted super neutral to others and myself just to ensure it doesn't cause those draining arguments with anyone again even by accident. Finally becoming aware how rotten habits one person from my past had sown, I breathe with more ease again and just say how it is. Even while times change, most of 8th generation Pokemon feel even "less" Pokemon to me than 4th, 5th and 7th gen. And I still found more or less I liked in those earlier generations like mega evolutions but it's not the same idea of what Pokemon was, that I "fell in love with".
And yes, sometimes change grinds my gears and it's unavoidable. But even more, people who take offense for having different personal tastes about Pokemon like that, totally grinds my gears! Lucky these types are still avoidable.
That there's a different style in Generation VIII was intentional: James Turner supervised the character design for this generation rather than Ken Sugimori, who had done so for Generations I to VII, since this time, Game Freak actually had an artist from the real-world location they based a region on besides Japan. This is likely the reason why, and you likely don't like Turner's style as much as Sugimori's. That's understandable, as Turner's first Pokémon designs--the Vanillite, Vullaby, and Golett lines--are some of the more divisive ones of Generation V. (For the record, Sugimori now has a mostly supervisory role; he still designs Pokémon, including Generation VIII Pokémon, but there have been roughly 50 artists who have designed Pokémon over the years.)
To get an idea of Turner's natural style,
Tembo the Badass Elephant was his personal project Game Freak put together. The way it looks and plays, you would never know it was from the same development team as some of the main series Pokémon games.
Me, I like the Generation VIII designs and I feel like there is a genuine Britishness to them that's normally uncharacteristic of Japanese media, which tend to depict the UK as a highly romanticized Victorian place--think the Professor Layton games. (The Japanese romanticize France in a similar way, which you can see with Kalos. There is a real psychological condition,
Paris Syndrome, in which Japanese tourists fall ill visiting popular cities when they find out they don't look like how they expected the places to look.) There's kind of a black comedy to some of them too, particularly the fossils.
I feel like many of us have gotten the "Gym Leader Syndrome", which has pushed us to wish/demand/request just about every type combination possible. How many of us are waiting for an Electric/Fighting, Ground/Fairy, Ice/Poison and whatnot? How many of us have started to see any single-typed Pokémon with disdain and blandness? How many of us have been angered for not getting any new type combinations for our dream team? Some of us rejoiced when we saw Morpeko and Toxtricity, while I'm sure some were not impressed by Boltund, Thievul and Edelgoss.
This has been somewhat extended to starter as well, especially with Gen 8, which had Rillaboom, Cinderace and Inteleon being single-typed starters, and not Grass/Dark, Fire/Ground and Water/Fighting (personal picks, minf you). This can be said even further to returning typings that a few have waited for more Pokémon. Fire/Rock (Gen 2 Marcargo to Gen 8 Coalossal), Fire/Dark (Gen 2 Houndoom to Gen 7 Incineroar), Water/Psychic (Gen 2 Slowking to Gen 7 Bruxish), just to name a few. Mega evolutions have locked some typings that people wished they were converted into regular ones, especially for their Pokémon. Sceptile (Grass/Dragon), Ampharos (Electric/Dragon), Lopbunny (Normal/Fighting), Altaria (Dragon/Fairy), Charizard (Fire/Dragon), Gyarados (Water/Dark), again to name a few.
That annoys me too, but I think part of it is because people had been building "50-foot slide" style speculations, getting excited about them, and getting disappointed when it didn't happen. I think that, in the age of Internet instantaneousness and social media, Game Freak's approach to being extremely quiet created that monster. In the absence of confirmed information, the fans create their own to hold them over.
That resulted in phenomena, like right here on the Serebii Forums, where people were guessing there would be Pokémon themed on the Beatles, the Nuckelavee, Elizabeth Tower, Lewis Carroll characters, C.S. Lewis characters (for some reason), and many other things (many of which were based on the aforementioned romanticized idea of how the UK must be like). When there WEREN'T Pokémon based on these concepts, they got angry, as if they were personally rejected. Instead, we got Pokémon based on concepts like The Shard (Gigantamax Duraludon), cats aboard Viking ships (Galarian Meowth and Perrserker), Scottish red squirrels (Greedent), and cormorants (Cramorant), which are largely more mundane but reflect actual British culture and history more accurately; the same people expecting Pokémon based on Theme-Park UK like the Mad Hatter, Beefeaters and Big Ben didn't recognize these references at all.
