I'd be inclined to give these games a 4/10, and I think that's being generous. I'm willing to allow for some growing pains, as these are the first truly open world Pokemon titles, but I don't think that really justifies the level of quality and content - or lack thereof - present in the games.
Whilst I think they realised the open world better than expected, I didn't feel like it added anything of substantial value to the gameplay: there were no meaningful sidequests, no hidden secrets to explore, no real benefit to exploration, and, as with Legends Arceus, a lot of seemingly random Pokemon placement that felt more contrived than it did organic. Having three separate storylines - and I am using that term very loosely - was a nice idea, but none of them were sufficiently fleshed-out to really leave much of an impact, so fundamentally it felt like exactly the same thing, just more segregated. I don't mind more of the same, because with Pokemon you have always gotten exactly the same thing, over and over, since the first generation. That's part of why it sells so well, part of its lasting appeal, and also why I play it: I know exactly what I'm getting myself into, and that's comforting in a lot of ways. I know that regardless of whatever gripes I have, whatever improvements could be made, I'm guaranteed a minimum level of enjoyment, and that's a valuable thing to have these days with so many games on the market, and so many high-profile titles turning out to be colossal disappointments. But the fact remains that Game Freak can and should do better.
Within the confines of the franchise, I think that Scarlet and Violet are another case of "one step forward, five steps back" because they took a good, positive step forward by allowing players more freedom of movement, but it came at far too high a cost, and a lot of the features incorporated into and lessons learned from Legends Arceus were completely discarded. In a lot of ways that freedom also worked against the games, because with three under-developed separate pathways it felt as though the game lacked focus, and the lack of reward for exploration only made them feel that much emptier and awkward. Comparing them with other games available on the market, they're so far behind that it's appalling that they were released in the state they're in. These look and feel like PS2-era titles from small third-party developers who jumped on the bandwagon to try and exploit the current trends with no understanding of how they work, not current generation titles from one of the most well-known and successful developers in the industry who have popularised and still own an entire genre that has sparked the creation of numerous titles that are not even half as successful even though they are hundreds of times better than anything Game Freak has put out this generation.
These games are like the cheap, store-brand junk "food" that you can buy: you know how bad it is compared to literally everything else on the market, but you get a warped enjoyment out of eating it anyway because you just want that food and you don't care how bad it is as long as it's the food you want and it has a taste approximating what you want. As long as you don't stop to look at what is actually in it and just how bad it really is, it's fine. You can pretend, whilst you're eating it, that its gourmet quality, not barely edible garbage. But, in this analogy...these games are just a little bit past their expiration date. But the flavour is still there.
