Semi-hot take: I think that a lot of people who thought Scarlet and Violet were boring just. Didn’t read it.
I’m obsessed with watching people’s play-throughs to see what their reactions to certain story beats are and legit half of them would button-mash through the dialogue and miss important stuff. This then translates to people who watch the videos that can’t afford/ don’t want to buy the game not getting the opportunity to read it too so… yeah.
To me MandJTV did the best job of really getting into and reading the words out loud to get people immersed. Granted he has a lot of experience with the rest of the role-play type Pokemon videos that he does.
Maybe it’s just the English student in me but I genuinely think that these are my favorite Pokemon games to date purely due to the story. The performance issues suck (especially while I’m still using a day-one release switch), but I think this genuinely makes up for it.