People-Adventure or Pokémon-Adventure?

In the beginning, Pokémon involved the adventures of people, along with the eponymous creatures - which it still does today in its main series games as well as spinoff games like Pokémon Go. As the world expanded, Pokémon themselves could be made the primary focus of the adventure, most notably in the Mystery Dungeon and PokéPark series. This becomes dualistic in a sense, being that games can feature one or the other. Both have their own considerations and characteristics, which lead to preferences.

With a "people-adventure", the human characters are the "stars" alongside the Pokémon. The focus on interactions that are realistic, since they resemble much of the interactions in real life, but also fantastic, because they still involve Pokémon and their special capabilities. It can be said that the focus is really on "immersion", since the primary human character is most likely supposed to be a characterization of the actual human player, sometimes in a "you-are-you" situation. The adventure plays to the human aspect as much as it does to the Pokémon aspect.

In a "Pokémon-adventure", the Pokémon are the stars, with little to no human involvement. Here, there is a potential for more fantastic interactions, since the capabilities of Pokémon may be more exploited for this purpose rather than standard human interactions such as by simply talking. The focus then becomes placed on "imagination", as it becomes a view into what Pokémon might do among themselves and each other when the human aspect is almost completely removed. The Pokémon aspect is fully emphasized in this manner.

Which is better? I happen to like both, since the former is typical and the latter is unique. Some people, though, might like the former due to their familiarity with the main series games or other Pokémon games with actual human feature, for which many games do adhere to this. This might also explain the relative paucity of the latter. Either really isn't right or wrong; they're just fundamentally different approaches with different concepts.

Any Pokémon game will assuredly feature the creatures that bear its name. But then, not all Pokémon games may feature active human presence. That could be said as something dynamic about Pokémon games - that either one may occur depending on the nature and point of the games. Whatever happens and whichever players prefer, both will likely have their own inceptions as the world of Pokémon games moves forward.

One year ago: Kanto Starter Keychains