Oh, forgot the Let’s GO games in my other comment. They are the same game, just your starter is either Pikachu or Eevee depending on what version you get. They are a sort of retelling of Red/Blue/Yellow. I had fun with it, but it is pretty much just Pokemon Yellow HD.

I feel like Legends Arceus is the easy choice. It did some cool and fun stuff with the Pokemon formula and I generally had a pleasant time with it. Sword and Shield was a big letdown. I could see a lot of potential in it but the story and gameplay drops off hard half way through in a way that left me frustrated. Like I could SEE the potential. It was right there and they ran out of time or something I guess and just shipped what they had. Scarlet and Violet kinda went to the other extreme. It was like they wanted to avoid the story complaints so that’s where they put their focus. All their focus. Quality control? What’s that? Even now their online events are having to be run multiple times to make up for them being broken. And then still being broken the second time too. Legends Arceus is far from perfect, but they were able to strike an enjoyable balance. It has it’s quirks, but nothing egregious.

I’m sure they probably are still around, and would probably be decent for someone new to experience the content for themselves in an ethical way. But going that route for a long time player means giving up your current character that you’ve invested a lot of time into and any guild friend groups you are part of just so you can go play an approximation of an older version of the game. At that point it starts seeming like an addiction to me. Better to let the past go and seek out new experiences elsewhere.

But if you still enjoy their work I think that’s fine too. Especially if they are dead and can’t profit from it, if they would profit from it I, personally, just pirate it and that keeps my conscience clean.

This is pretty close to something I’ve been saying for a while now in regards to the whole ActivisionBlizzard sexual misconduct thing any time someone brings up separating the art from the artist. You can easily do that with a book or a movie simply by going to a local library. And for many games through piracy like you said.

For a live service game like World of Warcraft there is no real way to experience it without supporting them, either monetarily or in their precious monthly active users metric they switched to after they stopped reporting on subscriber counts. In that kind of case the only real option is to walk away.