imo that's far for the game's biggest fault. it's an eyesore, the plot wasn't that good, and while they nailed a lot of things regarding gameplay, other things felt undercooked.

and frankly, there's a bunch of big franchises (mario and zelda come to mind) where voice acting, while present, is nearly non-existant, so i never got the complaints about the lack of voice acting in pokemon.

Gonna heavily disagree there. Some franchises feel really ruined by their attempt to remove the player-videogame interface barrier. MonHun with its grunts for language back in 4th gen felt great and was even fun (reminded me of The Sims in a way) but when they added voice acting, the result honestly was a lot of cringe partly because of trying to also push face expressions into it (The Handler) or just because of adding corny, stupid attempts at voice acting (like most in-hunt shouts in Rise).

Honestly, adding voice acting for Pokémon feels even dangerous: most dialogue in the Pokémon games is already heavily corny, useless or flat-out redundant, but you'd also have to add Pokémon sounds and cries that somehow feel like they "match" as in coming from the same "universe" and have some variation across individual specimens. Because "klefki.midi" just doesn't cut it anylonger.