I'm real big on there being a timeline in Pokemon and many characters come back with new looks and given their own agency with stories happening behind whatever your protagonists see.
The franchise could've keep everyone static but it adds that little bit more to the setting.
Thinking about Platinum’s hour-long shmup that released this year that did look interesting, but it was $40, and you had to pay an extra $10 for the story, and it wasn’t dubbed so you had to read text in a genre that requires you to dodge bullets, and it sold extremely poorly.