Board 8 > What's the worst mainline Pokemon game?

(+) Yeah! (+)

or instead just take the meme form of my post

https://i.imgur.com/CSSbniI.png

Grimlyn posted...

even here coming up with the Board 8 Gym Challenge thing

I don't know if I still have my Hippowdon named ALAKAZAM from that, but I sure remember being the Ground-type leader. And also losing badly to TRE's Cacturne, lol.

I have to go with Scarlet/Violet. Just not good enough at the fundamental level, though it shows a lot of potential if development time was an extra year or so.

MoogleKupo141 posted...

its hard to explain because its mostly just a vibes thing, but Gen 3 has always been my least favorite

One thing is pokemon games are all pretty similar, so a major differentiating factor in my enjoyment of a given gen is the new Pokmon that get introduced and gen 3 was not a strong batch. I cant quite put my finger on it, but theres something about the look of the entire gen that just felt off to me.

Theres definitely some that I really like, but none of them would be among my absolute favorites. Theres probably at least five Pokmon in each other game that Id rank over every Pokmon introduced in Ruby/Sapphire.

oh but the actual worst game is probably the Diamond/Pearl remakes on the basis of being a colossal let down.

I think it's that they made the Gen III Pokemon more distinctly colorful to show off the GBA's capabilities, and it didn't always look great.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

I don't think you can just excuse the game shipping in and in some way still being in a completely unacceptable state regardless of the core quality of it.

It's basically Nintendo's 2077.

Yeah but I don't think it was "completely unacceptable" though is the issue. I didn't run into any horrific, game-ending glitches

Like I played XIII, the remake, before they patched it. That had certain dialogue or scripted events just refuse to trigger causing the level not to progress and me to be stuck. I fell through floors, stuff like that. That to me was "unacceptable". And if there was ever a game I'd want to defend, it'd be XIII, but there's no defense for that stupid mess.

SV I only ever encountered comparatively minor graphical stuff. "Completely unacceptable" doesn't jive with my experience at all and comes off as hyperbolic. I would even say Sword fits that description better - with SV I feel I got a complete, albeit glitchy, experience but Sword was so empty and most of its ideas so badly implemented that it to me fits the bill of "unacceptable" far more in my eyes.

Inevitable inequality just going on my experiences. Just the individual games, because ranking gens is more complicated.

Red > Black > Platinum > Scarlet > Emerald > Sun > Gold > X > Sword

Enjoyment doesn't start seriously going down until X and Sword but I agree with a lot of what Inviso said about 2. SM was fine (I agree the handholding was annoying and I was fairly unimpressed with the new Pokemon on the whole). I liked the exploration of 3 - checking out the dive spots, Sootopolis is the best city in the series (maybe Castelia comes close), and then the way they leaned into that in the remake with soaring.

I can't deny my love for RBY so I'm not going to. 5 and 4 are both fantastic though. 4 has my favourite lore, 5 has the best story and Themanitan

Incidentally PLA would come in right around Platinum, probably just below it but it's close
PLA ruled

Sun and Moon have issues but they also still have personally and polish. Then SS took also every issue people had (except I guess bringing back gyms) and included them again in what was an unfinished game instead.

It's undoubtfully one of the Switch games and I'm saying this as someone who still enjoys them.

I thought this'd be a gen 6 v 8 fight tbh. I get the complaints with S/M but I really thought they were starting to turn the series in an interesting direction there. Though I hadn't played gens 5 or 6 so that probably helped it feel fresher to me.

For experiences at the time...

Black > Crystal > Yellow > Emerald > S/V > Platinum > Sword > Sun > X

Gen 5 is just clearly the best version of the series for a multitude of reasons and nailed things they have still not gotten right since. Crystal and gen 2 have issues but the ambition was rewarding and the multitude of balances to the game series were almost all hits, even if later gens needed to tweak it more. Gen 1 has aged but it was still amazing (although since I got the games close to gen 2 releasing my memory is vivid that gen 2 > gen 1 in terms of fun) and then you get into a few gens that I love playing but are hard to sort.

Sword is the first step down, but I still enjoyed it a lot more than Sun or X which kind of killed my interest in pokemon for a long time. I just didn't find either game enjoyable and most of my knowledge of those gens comes from the card games.

S/M actually had some decent difficulty if you turned Exp Share off and ignored Z-moves, and the story was decent (granted it maybe only seemed that way when directly compared to X/Y).

andylt posted...

Though I hadn't played gens 5 or 6 so that probably helped it feel fresher to me.

so that's why bw2 got treated as a definitive ver on the poll instead of separate games...

(jk of course, i'm assuming the lack of definitive versions is why you must have skipped those gens in the first place)

mnk posted...

S/M actually had some decent difficulty if you turned Exp Share off and ignored Z-moves, and the story was decent (granted it maybe only seemed that way when directly compared to X/Y).

Yeah, either that or keeping a rotation of around 15 Pokemon or so. That's pretty much the only way to get any difficulty out of the games anymore, which is why giving PC access anywhere is like the one good thing that came out of Sword/Shield.

Having never played anything past Gen VI, it's easily DPPt for me. I've also never played Platinum, but man, Diamond and Pearl are easily the worst of the mainline games. Annoying characters, a sluggish chore to play through, not a great Dex, bad spread of Pokemon, all the annoying terrain gimmicks, dweeby Team Galactic except for primal edgelord Cyrus...