It's not just that the 7th gen had its "edgy" phase, a lot of bad trends happened there on account of the rise of HD. Mid-size studios closed en masse, DLC started to be abused, Japanese games were hated because Phil Fish and Keiji Inafune kept talking them down, and most importantly, linear games dominated most of the gen since the tools and expertise to make explorable worlds in HD weren't widespread. Again, I respect linearity as an artistic choice, but 7th gen games really misused it.
All in all, it's easy to see that the 7th gen was almost as awkward as the leap-to-3D 5th gen, albeit for different reasons.
I think there's a general struggle/adjustment with pretty much every odd numbered generation because its the one setting up the new paradigm for the next one to essentially refine it.
The first gen was more or less inventing the idea of home console gaming with many numerous variations and experiments (one game consoles, controllers on the systems themselves) that the second generation shifted more into consoles with swappable cartridges, controllers via cords, and giving real shape/illustration to on screen graphics.
The third gen is strong and fairly consistent, but even then, still has some growing pains acting as the real estuary between simple games/compromised arcade ports to original games with strong depth. Difficulty and even saving are still being figured out and the problems of slowdown/flickering do become an issue. The fourth gen then acts as a much cleaner version of that with more balanced difficulty, less graphical hiccups, and the games generally age better than its predecessor titles do because the growing sophistication of both the audience and designers.
The fifth gen is the wild west with everyone trying to figure out 3D graphics and how even translate the nature of sprite work into polygons. Solving the problem of cameras alone is a monumental task with many franchises not quite making the leap past 2D games because of such struggles. It's the era most doomed to aged questionably because determining what the future of gaming might be was such an unknown. The sixth gen as a result is much smoother with an actual understanding of polygons, much better camera use, and more unified idea on how to actually do the third dimension.
The seventh gen is its own struggle with HD development hitting many developers (more Japanese than Western) hard and the genuine merge of the PC and console markets really takes off which presents its own problems to studios not used to that sort of development. Online play and digital games prove to be trickier to some than others, and then skyrocketing costs of HD production decimates AA gaming and causes much less risk taking with game concepts to avoid loss. The eighth gen in turn rectifies some of this with the indie scene now filling in the space of missing mid-level titles, developers a bit more experienced with HD assets, more diverse genres blooming again, and Japan eventually getting some of the market back with their own lessons learned.
This Im sadly not the biggest fan of kakarot and dont have great online so the classic stuff in those games isnt for me personally!
