Horii & Miyamoto Interview (1989)

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>H: [...] If you were to write a novelesque story for a video game, players would feel that it dragged on and on. The sense that you were the one driving the story would disappear. I think the most important aspect of game design is to immerse the player in the game’s universe and make them feel like they’re actively driving the plot.

>M: [...] There are scenes that make you feel as though you’re the one doing everything, and scenes that make you feel like you’re being pulled along against your will. I actually really dislike taking control away from the player.

>M: [...] I don’t think Adventure of Link had very good cutscenes. You feel like you’re watching things happen rather than achieving them yourself.

>H: [...] That’s what makes games different from movies or novels. If you make it work, you won’t alienate the players, and it’s possible to make them feel like they’re actually there.

Holy hell, it's incridible how such deep understanding of what makes a RPG good already existed in 1989, they even talked about the possibility of ONLINE rpgs in 89! Game Freak really stayed away of the core concept of what makes a RPG truly a RPG, in plain 2016, almost three decades of "evolution" later.

The line between gameplay and story-telling needs to be fixed in Pokemon, we have too much cutscenes and little gameplay, the immersion is totally broken, we need to go back to the roots.