>Never played Pokemon as a kid or watched the shows
Is it too late for me to get into Pokemon? It won’t have that nostalgic factor and most of it is made for kids. Am I doomed to have missed out on the Pokemon experience forever?

It was too late ever since 2013.

>>57967901 (OP)
The series stopped being good in 2013. If you want to play the games afterward, you can; but you'll never experience the series in it's prime.

>>57967901 (OP)
Idk, play Pokemon Black and White and their sequels, then a peak romhack like Unbound and get back to us on your impressions. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, but one I find has worn out after years of replaying my favourite games.

>>57967901 (OP)
Stop being a bitch and just play it. If you like it you like it. If you don't you don't.

>>57967906
>>57967919
Why 2013 specifically

>>57967901 (OP)
If anything, the lack of nostalgia will allow you to enjoy it more freely and form an unbiased opinion on it. Half of the board gaslights themselves into thinking that all modern gens are bad because they cling to whatever games they played before they grew up, thinking that nothing else can live up to it.

Just try whatever game seems appealing to you anon. You got nothing to lose. You don't need to know anything about Pokémon to enjoy it. That's part of the reason why children still enjoy this franchise, it's very easy to get into and doesn't require any knowledge.

>>57967901 (OP)
why not just go play some pokémon and see for yourself? how should i know if you're going to like it? i've been playing pokémon since 2009, i can't imagine a life without pokémon at this point.
the games are good, at least gen 2-7 for sure, though some of the modern games are good as well, go play whichever one interests you and see how you like it, and then play more

>>57967952
I’ve heard from a lot of people that the appeal of Pokemon today is because of the nostalgia from their childhood and that without that nostalgia it wouldn’t really hold up.

>>57967957
That's copium. The brand constantly reinvents itself to pander to young, modern audiences. That's why kids still get into the series. Otherwise you'd have a Digimon situation where the vast majority of fans are adult who have been fans for a long time.

>>57967940
>Half of the board gaslights themselves into thinking that all modern gens are bad because they cling to whatever games they played before they grew up, thinking that nothing else can live up to it.
And yet, there are many first person shooting games that should have existed as nothing more a Doom total conversion.

>>57967957
this is only because in reality pokémon is actually a (relatively to its perception) niche gaming experience that, at the time, was much more accessible and reasonable to enjoy, and was pretty up to date per the consoles it was on at the time
most people who enjoyed pokémon in childhood played it because it was big and got nostalgia for it because they played it, and their perception of it is skewed towards those games and against the modern ones despite them not being really that different, outside of graphics and the like
the real pokémon experience and the real pokémon fan is probably an autistic person obsessed with cute anime girls and cute creatures as well as interesting usage of rng and data structures and stuff like that, also the kind who enjoys memorization
if this sounds at all like you, go fucking crazy, but just keep in mind, there's a reason why many people say shit like "i used to like pokémon until i started playing Real rpgs!", it's not a game you play for a jrpg experience, it's a game you play for a pokémon experience

Why can't I just download an app that basically lets me raise a pokemon from an egg?
Like you could give it treats, talk to it, give it pets, and even play with it. Maybe even teach it how to Numbers 1 and 2 without ruining the carpets.
Imagine how H E double hockey sticks A (hella) cool that would be.

>>57967901 (OP)
Play Yellow, Crystal, Firered, Emerald, Platinum, Heartgold, Black, then Black2, and stop there. The rest are bad.

bnuuy

>>57967940
>Half of the board gaslights themselves into thinking that all modern gens are bad because they cling to whatever games they played before they grew up
the only outright bad games in recent memory are Sword/Shield and BDSP

>>57967901 (OP)
Not being blinded by nostalgia is good, you could end up like this guy >>57968020

>>57968028
swsh isn't even bad
bdsp is just dp again so there's little point to play it but i wouldn't say dp is bad so bdsp isn't either

>>57968072
NTA but SwSh is pure ass

>>57968072
BDSP literally has a broken calculator, one of the most simple things you could possibly code.

>>57968072
BDSP is completely redundant, didn't add the good shit from Platinum (Move tutors, graphical updates, Distortion World, Battle Frontier), copypasted code with bugs from 2006, dexit extended to it eliminating one of the best parts of remakes (even if the new mons weren't in the campaigns of remakes past they were still in the code), and yet they still fucked it with built-in affection mechanics, and gutted Secret Bases. It was so shitty nobody even talks about remakes anymore

>>57967938
cause x/y are shit

>>57968022
this tbqh

>>57968072

DP wasn't great in 2007 and only feels worse in 2025. It's just a remake at the end of the day so I'm pretty neutral toward it. SwSh being as mediocre as it is still surprises me though.

>>57968022
>>57968220

literally the best parts of gen 4/8

>>57968215
Surely’s been more games than that since 2013

>>57968018
This would be my ideal Pokemon game.

I would agree that the "Pokemon experience" is more "multimedia" than most, in so much as the Game Freak RPGs alone won't explain the brand's gargantuan popularity because they are only a part of the machine. But there's no harm in trying.

>>57967938
Discussing the core Pokemon games pulls you in two directions. On the one hand, the games are mostly very similar, and the QoL of the battle and training mechanics usually get observably better with each game, such that someone might just tell you to play the newest release and leave it at that. But certain design elements- be it map design, story pacing, additional tie-in games, etc.- tend to give certain games their fans, alongside a lot of people obviously being attached to the games they grew up with. There are different reasons not to like or not like the full 3D games (starting with X/Y in 2013), so I won't put words in anyone's mouth. Unless we WANT to dig into game mechanics.

>>57967984
>It isn't a JRPG experience, it is a "Pokemon" experience
This is fair, and it ties back into what I said about the brand being so much bigger than its core material suggests. These are cute little Game Boy games and the echoes of cute little Game Boy games.

I think it would be a neat opportunity to tackle everything systematically, really see how the franchise evolved from year to year. But I also think that nobody here has that kind of perception either because all of Pokémon's cross-media promotion (ie. the anime starts promoting Kanto stuff again right around the time of FRLG coming out) is tied to Japanese release dates. There's a three part anime special tied to Pokémon Crystal (or rather Gen II in general) that came out around the time Crystal was in stores in Japan, and it didn't come out until years later outside Japan, losing whatever relevance it had.

It doesn't help that much of early Pokémon lacks documentation in the west because it was in the early days of the internet and most people into it were kids. A website like Serebii is the most popular fansite and it's not much better than a kid's fansite from the 90s.

>>57968077
>>57968249
what do you find so bad about swsh? i enjoyed playing it and enjoyed a lot of what it did, the story was weak and sure the graphics kind of suck but there's quite a lot about it that's not bad

>>57967901 (OP)
Well, you can watch the show on the pokemon youTube channel. The first movie is being streamed right now https://youtu.be/25pjnjIVbjU

>>57967901 (OP)
Even if you went back to the gens this board considers to be the good ones I doubt you'd enjoy them that much. There's no need to force yourself into liking it just so you don't "miss out"

>>57967901 (OP)
Genuinely surprised the thread didn't get derailed due to OP's fetish art.
To answer the question, you might as well just play the games if you're interested in them. Never too late to get into a new hobby.