I would care for the narrative in a Pokemon game if it had advanced or changed in any way at all since Gen III. I play a lot of JRPGs, and one of the main reasons for that is because of the rich narrative experience they can provide. I love a good story. This is something that Pokemon has never had. Ever. There is fundamentally no meaningful difference whatsoever between the narrative from Gen III right up to Gen VIII, and god is it tiresome by now. It was tiresome three generations ago. Now it's gone past absurdity into outright farce.
Game Freak need to either hire someone who knows how to write a story (or at the very least a different story, because they've worn Gen III's narrative right out at this point) or do away with that aspect entirely. You can just as effectively tell a story through worldbuilding as you can from having NPCs shoved in your face telling you what is going on...and I actually think this approach would work better with the main series Pokemon games, which does not give you a traditional party of characters, and can't really develop its NPCs properly (or even give them identifiable personalities beyond one or two character tropes) when they're out of sight for 90% of the game. You cannot develop a character in a meaningful fashion in 1 or 2 scenes by changing their appearance and Pokemon team, and if you have them holding your hand for the entire game they become a hindrance, because they have no real purpose other than to slow your progress...as was the case with Lillie, who never had anything meaningful to say.
A hands-off approach to narrative that focused on lore and worldbuilding would be much, MUCH less intrusive than what they currently have. Let the player decide how much of the story they want to dive into, rather than forcing it on them with these ridiculously banal streams of NPC dialogue. But for crying out loud, have enough there that the majority of it isn't left to the player's imagination, as it very clearly has been for several generations now. The existence of a more complex narrative and character in Pokemon games seems to be a figment of the player's imagination based on a few scarce breadcrumbs in the game, and that's just lazy and bad writing.
This is just the main series of games, of course. Whilst they're not the best narratives in the world by all means, the Mystery Dungeon series at least manages to establish character personalities, meaningful growth, and whilst they rely on the same initial premise of an amnesiac human stuck in the form of a Pokemon, they manage to flesh it out in different ways across the various games so that it feels like a different experience each time. Honestly, that's what I'd like to see from the main series of games if they're going to keep pushing this narrative of "evil team wants to use Legendary Pokemon to control the world" thing - expand on the reasons WHY, give some actual personalities to characters and have them develop over time, and offer a bit more player agency too. Perhaps some dialogue choices, or something that makes your character more than just a blank puppet. Give them a voice and an identity. Give us the opportunity to grow attached to the world and characters, or the opportunity to ignore it entirely. Don't just sketch in what we've had before and force us to sit through it and make up the rest ourselves.
