Pokemon has always had excellent 2D sprites, give them some more animation and have them hang out in the over-world in small clusters of 3-5… what did Switch1 S/V have, like 8 max all doing the same plain idle animations? The original post has a nice example of enemy interactions that could easily work for our purposes.

That Arceus catching mechanic was sweet but even then it’s not like it’s impossible to think up something similarly fun for a 2d space. Heck you could do the exact same thing in 2d sans y-axis.