Why was Gen 3 (Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald) so disliked when it came out in 2002-2005?

the fad burned out by the time crystal came out, so there was that "wow you still play that shit?" sentiment. don't think the hardware leap cutting rbgy/gsc backwards compatibility won it any points at the time either

>>57998394 (OP)
it wasn't this is a stupid genwar thread

>>57998394 (OP)
Depends who you talk to, I think most of the negativity was coming from people who had grown up with gens 1 & 2 who were getting into middle and high school by this time and getting into other things so it wasn't "cool" to like Pokemon anymore. There were some legitimate complaints like lack of real time features from GSC and inability to transfer Pokemon from the old games, but I feel like that was mostly just justification for their aging out of the games.

I'm a '97 kid so RSE were coming out right around the time I was starting to play Pokemon, and they was huge among my age group. If you asked my generation, they would probably have mostly very positive memories of the games. But my older brother who played Pokemon at the height of Pokemania skipped them and didn't get back into Pokemon until HGSS. It was just the first real generational divide in the series.

>>57998407
As someone who grew up with Gen 1, it was largely just because the fad died around my friend group and family. I’d actually never heard of people complaining about the Time Machine thing until I started visiting more forums right before DP came out. Nowadays it feels like cherry-picking issues.

Liking Pokemon was somewhat normie social suicide from 2002 till at least 2013 if you were older than 11
XY kinda brought back some normies playing it when they were in uni/out of high school. And Pokemon Go got the world back

>>57998403

>>57998416
Yeah, that's kind of what I figured. Those are just reasons I've seen thrown around online, but my brother never talked about that stuff. He just stopped playing the games cause he was getting older and into more mature games.
But like I said, they were big with my age group. Nearly every kid in my school played RSE, collected cards and merch etc. From my perspective, you wouldn't have have thought the Pokemon fad died, it just shifted generations. Of course now I can look back with a wider perspective and acknowledge it was bigger at its height, but it was still big in the early 2000s too.

>>57998402
fpbp - the reason why Gen III was so "disliked" and Pokemon's popularity went down was not really issue with the game itself, but the fact that the OG Pokemon kids just grew out of it and for them Pokemon was now "lame shit for kiddies".
People really try to pin end of Pokemania on a particular generation but in reality it just ended naturally, because target audience stopped giving a shit. Pokemon still was an exception because this kind of overly popular franchises stay relevant for 1-2 years, usually.

Because it's the Gen where they finally went full Jew

>>57998462
This logic's retarded to me.
If you want every Pokemon in Gen 2 you need a full set of Gen 1 games.
If you want every Pokemon in Gen 4 you need all the GBA games AND HGSS.
Hell even this image itself is dishonest since the most you actually need to get all 386 mons in Gen 3 is Ruby, Sapphire, FireRed, LeafGreen and Colosseum.
Emerald and XD are totally unnecessary.

>>57998462
>>57998467
the first time i heard about this was from tama’s video and yeah it was always a bit exaggerated i agree, but the difference is that RB and GS were made so you could complete the national dex right away, while with RS it was literally impossible at launch, that part sucks, because it shows they already planned to sell you more games just to finish the dex

>>57998462
I can forgive some of the exclusivity, but they made some really bad choices on things. Slowpoke is only in leaf green? The real bad call was the colosseum/emerald safari extension pokemon. Many more of those should have been in FR/LG. They could have cut it in half and made them version exclusives.

>>57998394 (OP)
I had no opinion because i didn't play on release like with gen 1, but it later became my favorite when i got to emulate it. I like the variety and quality in both the dex and region designs.

I was born in 94, and I remember wanting Ruby and a crimson GBA SP so badly in 2003. My personal experience before this was with Gen II, and I watched my cousins play Gen I, watched the anime, owned a bunch of cards and toys, and saw the first movie in theaters. At the time, I thought Ruby and Sapphire looked so ADVANCED, for lack of a better word. But playing it, FireRed, and Emerald, I think it didn't capture the same heights I felt for Pokémon previously. I enjoyed Gen IV more, so it wasn't just an age/first experience thing.

>>57998416
There are genuine letdowns with Gen III. Ruby and Sapphire feel blatantly unfinished compared to its predecessors. The final third of the game is the FINAL THIRD of the game, there's very little to do post-game, and that final third also lacks much of the quality that went into the first two-thirds. Every time Gen III comes up, I feel obligated to remind people that DITTO WAS NOT OBTAINABLE WITHOUT A CHEATING DEVICE UNTIL FRLG. Gen II was the Gen that kept on giving, it made you feel like there was so much hidden, there was even a second set of credits. It should say something that many of Ruby and Sapphire's rumors and fake cheats involve being able to return to Johto or go to other regions.

gen 2 innovated, gen 3 removed some of those innovations.

no day/night cycle etc..

>>57998394 (OP)
>Gen 2
Sequels that build on everything you liked in the previous games
>Gen 3
Reboots that get rid of lots of what you liked in the previous games

>>57998486
So was Gen 3 more ambitious? Yeah

>>57998467
What? You only need one Gen I game, you can just reset it to get all the starters and fossils. With any Gen I game along with a copy of Gold and Silver, you can get 249 Pokémon. Both Mew and Celebi were simple distributions, even before Crystal and the GS Ball. This also means you can get 150 Pokémon in any Gen I game. All you need is
>Any Gen I game
>Gold
>Silver
>Two Game Boys
>Link cable

Gen III, meanwhile, is a clusterfuck of add-ons and accessories. They never did the Altering Cave event in FRLG, so you have to rely on the Orre games and Emerald's Safari Zone to get those. Of course there are true exclusives like Zangoose (Ruby), Lunatone (Sapphire), Shellder (FireRed), Slowpoke (LeafGreen), and Mew (Emerald). Some of these are offset by the Orre games, but the hardware ecosystem in Gen III was highly predatory. It's not just Pokémon either, Nintendo was doing this with a lot of their games.
>Five GBA games
>Multi battles with four players
>This requires three link cables
>But there are also wireless adapters for FRLG onward, and this is the only way Union Rooms work
>But don't forget the e-Reader content (mostly unreleased outside Japan anyway)
>Oh wait they randomized e-Reader card packs after Ruby and Sapphire to make you buy more packs to complete your collection
>And there's of course buying a GameCube
>So you can buy the Orre games
>And maybe Box too while you're at it
>But don't forget to buy four GCN-GBA cables to fully utilize the games
A complete Gen III ecosystem feels like it's greater than all of Gen I and II combined
>Four Gen I GB games
>Three Gen II GBC games
>Two GBCs
>One link cable
>Pocket Pikachu 2
>Mobile Adapter GB for Japanese Crystal
>N64
>Three N64 games
>Three additional controllers, but that's just for minigames
>Two(?) Transfer Paks
I don't even have to mention the Super Game Boy because the last Stadium game has it built in, while the same isn't true for the Game Boy Player on the GameCube.

>>57998394 (OP)
a lot of people felt it ugly

>>57998467
In Gen 1 and 2 you needed 2 games to complete the Pokedex. In Gen 3, suddenly you needed half a dozen games, some of which were on a completely different system. Nice false equivalence

>>57998394 (OP)
There was the general end of Pokemania that had them dismissed and the loss of features like Day/Night that in RS weren't made up for.

You can't complete the pokedex with just Gold and Silver, you NEED to transfer up some oldmons. Ruby and Sapphire together can complete the pokedex, because that now means completing the regional pokedex. The national dex is a bonus objective for spergs, it's a hidden feature they never encourage you to do, there isn't even a trainer card star for it.

>>57998559
You absolutely cannot complete the Gen 2 dex with just two games, even discounting the original starters there aren't enough elemental stones in the Johto games to get every evolution that requires them, nor can you get the fossils.

>>57998402
This I was frankly just tired of pokemon and needed a break then hopped back in when gen 4 came out. I still need to play through gen 3 though because I heard it's really good.

>>57998592
Trye, but almost everybody who played Gen 2 had a Gen 1 cartridge lying around. Of course you couldn't do this in Gen 3 because they broke the backwards compatibility

>>57998394 (OP)
It wasn't. Every one at school had a GBA and this game

>>57998467
You can also use Emerald, LeafGreen and XD.

Just trade with other people who had the opposite versions. What's the issue?

>>57998394 (OP)
Because the Sony consolewars were winning massively at the time, while Nintendo still fumbled with what was universally understood as "faggot baby games." Meanwhile Playstation was cranking out shit like GTA, sports games with a real world basis you could play to bond with your older siblings and/or dad, and all the other violent shit that was vogue in the era of edgy attitude. Even if you couldn't get in on that good shit, Sony still had plenty of mascot games that were more acceptable because they had cool or funny concepts compared to Bing Bing Wahoo Man and friends.

>>57998394 (OP)
I was there

Many people were growing out of Pokemon at the time, so if you were still playing them, it was kinda "uncool." Also pokemania was over.
Of course I still played them and so did my friends, we were just more covert about it and didn't play it out in the open at school.

Big complaints about Gen 3 were no trading with Gen 1&2 and no day/night cycle. Also no revisiting old regions like Kanto in GSC
There was a feeling that many beloved features of Gen 2 weren't present and it felt like a downgrade.

These are more "in the moment" complaints though. In hindsight going back from the present day, I love Gen 3 and a lot of the complaints were unwarranted. I originally had Sapphire and Emerald at the time. I got bored by the third gym in Emerald (already played through Sapphire) but recently decades later replayed Emerald and I now think it's the best game in the series. I would never think this back in the day.

Can only speak for myself but given the cost of a Super NES was IR£150 in 1992 and the cost of a GBA (essentially a protable SNES) was IR£200, it didn't make any kind of financial sense to buy the GBA.

Imagine if Pokemon Go had failed. Maybe the Switch games would've had more effort and optimization to try and bring people back.

>>57998645
If you really want to stretch the definition of "minimum games needed" then you can use ACE in a JP Emerald and get all the event mons + version exclusives/starters
Only one game and one cartridge

>>57998394 (OP)
At the time we thought it was kinda soulless and that the duller color palette and lack of shades were an unwelcomed departure from the Sugimori-style that made the charm of pokemon in the first place.
We also felt that the focus on adding more strategy elements rather than creating a world that felt alive and immersive was a mistake, especially for a license such as pokemon

there were a few losers calling us genwunners but generally they were beaten or molested by their parents at home
Anyway that was the sentiment between me and my other 8y.o friends

>>57998394 (OP)
Making most of your roster arbitrary replacements for old stand-ins was a terrible idea that was widely unpopular every time they tried it. See Gen 5 on this as well.
This was only more stark with Gen 3 though. Gen 2 added itself onto Gen 1's world, Gen 3 just made its own world. Gen 2 used its roster to fill out the holes in the Gen 1 roster and create weird niche stuff to chase, Gen 3 decided it needed its own generic bug/bird/normal/etc. pokemon to fill the initial routes with. Gen 2 added on a day/night system, Gen 3 took that away. Gen 2 added multiple new types, Gen 3 added no new types.

Every new gen was always disliked since gen 3, I remember gen 4 even more hated especially the designs you can search old forums and comments on serebii or others websites

>>57998866
>gen 3
Gen 2. Old good new bad sentiment is older than you, zoomie

>>57998394 (OP)
No day/night cycle was such a huge stepdown I didn't even bother getting a GBA. I only played gen 3 when I got a DS.

>>57998559
In Gen 1 and 2 you can't complete the Hoenn dex

>>57998394 (OP)
RSE looked ugly. Honestly, for Emerald they should have adapted FRLG styled tileset.

Gen 4 was hated too remember when vespiquen was called medabot rip off because she looks like metabee hahaha what a funny times

>>57998866
old YouTube comments too

>>57998394 (OP)
I was in 2nd grade when RS launched in America. I had started playing with Yellow literally as soon as I could read because I wanted in on the cool thing all the "big kids" were playing on the block.
But even then, at 7, 8 years old, a lot of the kids at school thought Pokemon had become stupid and for kids, everyone was into Yu-Gi-Oh since it looks edgier.

I personally was hyped for the new graphics but I really hated most of the Pokemon designs. I thought Treecko was cool, but then everything else was pretty ugly, I just didn't feel attached to the monsters as I had in Gen 1 and 2. No surprise to me now that they looked jarring on purpose. And the cut features from GSC, especially the clock, made the games feel repetitive, and it didn't help my launch Ruby was afflicted with the Berry Glitch and I had no way to fix it not having pre-ordered Colosseum and then not being able to trade with myself in Emerald. I enjoyed FireRed much more overall.

>>57998426
The difference for zoomers who grew up on Gen 3 is that Pokemon was just something that they played at a certain age. When Pokemania was on, everyone played that shit, little kids, teenagers in middle and high school, girls, everyone. Not everyone watched the anime as it was in fact kiddy shit but the teens were buying cards and having a blast.
Pokemon was stuck as this game for kids 8 and younger from about 2003-2008. No one watched the show, the cards were selling a quarter of their peak at best, the games were ignored by the general public. Gen 4 and the explosion of the DS as well as wifi sort of saved it until it really came back later.
So it was "big" in the early 2000s only if you were like 5 in 2003, because you would have grown up into gen 4 making it somewhat less niche again. Basically, the popularity of the series never really fell off again after that.

>>57998394 (OP)
Was it? Everyone like it when it first came out, granted I was in, like, 5th grade

>>57998472
Never understood that complaint, yeah no shit they want to sell you more games. We were lucky they made new games (as in FRLG being a different region) and interesting spinoffs to get us the rest of the Pokemon instead of just pulling some expansion pack bullshit and releasing "Super Ruby and Sapphire" a few years down the line (you could argue that's what third versions are but because they fragmented the dex Emerald never was a totally superior value vs RS).
It isn't like they didn't attempt to have backwards compatible trading either, I think what probably happened is when they ran into trouble with that peripheral, they just said fuck it because it would have come out too late, nd they already had plans to make the rest of the Pokemon obtainable within Gen 3 for those who didn't have an older game to trade from. A special Link Cable that cost 30 or more dollars releasing in like 2005 that was only for one single game would have been a total waste of resources. They either needed it ready to pack-in by Colosseum but they didn't have it, and that was that.

>>57998638
Ok but how were you trading with yourself? Nobody had two Game Boys, so you either had to borrow one or rent one.

>>57998919
these guys are on the money, how did they do it so long ago?

>>57998866
Gen 4 designs are pretty bad on the whole, you can tell they were mostly Hoenn rejects that the design team went back to. But people accepted the digimon-ass legendaries in exchange for fun games packed with features (that Gen 3 removed).

I played it when it came out after extensively replaying silver and red over and over. It didn't hold my attention. Later I bought a DS and played Pokemon black all the way. I think it just wasn't as good.

>>57998462
>I had access to all but one of these

Feels pretty good growing up with Blue(born: 92) then Crystal, and still being enough of a fan to dominate gen 3 playing.

>>57998394 (OP)
Ruby and Sapphire are super empty, shitty games, FRLG are soulless, and the GC games suck ass. Gen 3 is carried by Emeral'd postgame and romhacks

>>57998394 (OP)
Gen 3 was so strange to look at back in the day.
I remember looking at groudon on the cover and being confused on if it was a pokemon or not.
That being said gen 3 ended up being my favorite gen.

>>57998394 (OP)
What actually happened back in the day
>gen 1
People of all ages knew about Pokemon. Mostly kids and some teenagers played the games. There was more interest in the anime and collecting cards.
>gen 2
Some kids stuck around and other kids got into it, but most of the normies dropped Pokemon as a whole. It didn't help that the anime was stalling. Many were selling or giving away their cards.
>gen 3+
Pokemon was locked into a baby kid's franchise. If your class liked Pokemon by then, you were probably still in elementary school. Otherwise you were looked down upon and your only friends were your autistic Pokemon buddies.

>>57999006
Your description of Gen 2 is wrong my man, Gold and Silver were probably the peak of Pokemania in terms of hype and sales. Maybe the oldest players, the high school kids, didn't get into it because they'd outgrown it (and would go on to become 40 year old genwunners), but everyone 12 and under got GS, many started with it because it was still a fad.
The reason the card game cratered at that point was because of Wizards being retards and trying to force all of the older players onto Magic, and ruining the meta by misprinting Slowking and not issuing an errata. Plus, people who "invested" in Base Set had already cashed out to avoid getting Beanie Babied again.
The end of Gen 2 was how you described, butprobably up through the release of the 3rd movie, it was still a full-swing hype train. By the time Crystal came, the anime was stuck in terrible Johto COTD shit, the TCG had fallen off for the reasons stated, and people just didn't want to buy a GBC game after the GBA released. If they had skipped Crystal and gone for a GBA launch title, the fad may have carried on.

>>57998919
which video is this from?

>>57999006
Pokémon is actually a great filter when you think about it: it immediately shows you who’s not worth talking to if they judge you negatively just because you like it

>>57999028
i didn't experience pokemania, but i know for sure how hyped people were when they saw donphan in the first movie

>>57999028
Crystal killed it. “Oh a Suicune game? I already have Suicune.” Don’t ask me why no one felt that way about yellow besides
>anime
but tripling down instead of doing something new killed it.

>be me, 13 in 2003
>still love pokemon and my autism makes it so i don't give a shit if no one else does
>see new pokemon game is out in store window
>holy fucking shit look at that cool dinosaur thing and red shiny box, plus gems as titles sound extravagant
>I GOTTA FUCKING HAVE IT
>mum tells me i can't have it for whatever dumb reason
>screw that, take all my poket money i had saved and buy it after school
>was literally the first thing i ever bought on my own.
>fire it up, assaulted with bliss. blown away by everything. the music, the colours, the newness of it all, the cool new mons, the excitement of a new adventure after loving the first 2 gens.
>enjoy the whole game so much, play the ever loving shit out of it for weeks and replay for years. best fucking time
zero regrets, best decision i ever made

>>57998752
>We also felt that the focus on adding more strategy elements rather than creating a world that felt alive and immersive was a mistake, especially for a license such as pokemon
This is why SV sold like hotcakes. Compfags will never understand.

Kds gave up on the TV show when Ash lost to Blaziken and boxed his old Pokemon.
Ruby/Sapphire felt smaller than Kanto + Johto which was like two games together.
Collecting Pokemon was harder, since there was no backwards trading and you had to get Kanto/Johto mons again through FRLG, Colosseum and GoD.
General franchise fatigue.

>>57999072
Based

>>57999072
Based af

>>57999078
SV's world is so shit it would be the opposite. Compfags bought the game anyway and vibefags bought $700 in merch instead.

>>57999072
Giga based

>>57998690
I'd love to know if there were any absolutely showstopping technical barriers to trade between Tohjo and Hoenn beyond “GF lazy”. Poké Transporter GB has proven after the fact that it's possible, so….

>>57999151
The main issues were the following:
>Pokemon data is stored in a completely different way starting from Gen 3 and to transfer a Pokemon would involve rolling a new one from scratch: nature, ability, personality value, shiny check, plus how do you equate DVs and StatExp to IVs and EVs
>GBA Link Cable was totally different from the previous versions and not backwards compatible so any peripheral that was just a cord would have needed to talk to a GBA ROM in Game Boy mode (not even sure if this is possible)
>Adding additional hardware like a hub to transcode between GB and GBA Link mode would have probably made the device prohibitively expensive to manufacture, meaning it wouldn't be a free pack-in and probably cost more than $20 for a unitasker
I think partly they realized the cost of building and manufacturing the special cables was not worth it, and partly were talked down from pursuing it to avoid canabalizing future software sales at a time when the series was on life support.

As someone who grew up playing the games, I found these games to be a step backward as a kid. Going from Crystal to Ruby was a disappointment for me, but I have trouble remembering exactly why. The region just felt boring. Did RSE have animated sprites? I feel like going from Crystal having animated sprites to RSE having non animated sprites would be a dealbreaker for me as a kid! Little dumb things like that really matter to kids, I think. I feel like that's why kids won't go back and play old games!

>>57999115
SV outsold Red and Green in Japan and is the best selling Switch Pokémon game worldwide. You are evidently wrong, and I don't know why you pretend otherwise.

>>57998394 (OP)
Too much water

>>57999238
What franchise didn't set records on the Switch? It could've performed way better than it did. Pokemon makes far more money selling merch regardless.

>>57999203
For some reason, I thought there already was such a cable. ^^;

For DVs, I'd probably double them and add one, so a 15 DV equates to a 31 IV; the Special DV would be used for both SpA and SpD.

For stat experience, I'd divide each one by 256 but cap at 252.

>>57999151
>Poké Transporter GB has proven after the fact that it's possible
It makes up a ton of data and wouldn't support two-way trades.

>>57998394 (OP)
I still think that Emerald has peak Pokemon aesthetics. Also the engine runs hella smooth for a Nintendo portable console. Yeah it's mostly slideshows in game but holy crap the music, visuals and choreography in general hit this sweet spot of balance between naturalism and what they'd call "Y2K early 2000s aesthetics".

I even used to think that the Lilycove theme song was written by a legit composer (obviously it's probably actually just Masuda or something but nobody knew about that at the time).

But the ADVANCED seasons were my introduction to the anime and Emerald was my first game so I guess I'm biased.

ADVANCED rocks

>>57999269
Nope, you can use old link cables on the GBA but they only work for GB titles. Nintendo wasn't thinking about cross-platform communications, just improving the link abilities of the GBA and I think Game Freak didn't worry too much, hence why they took the opportunity to rebuild a broken codebase for their game. It was only after the initial reveal of RS that people started asking about trades with GSC and that's probably when they looked at trying something. .

One thing that gets lost with the complaints is that it almost certainly would have been one way, as it has been since Gen 4. People didn't care because they were happy to transfer again, but if Gen 3 had launched with one-way transfers people probably would have shit on that, too.

>>57999291
>I even used to think that the Lilycove theme song was written by a legit composer (obviously it's probably actually just Masuda or something but nobody knew about that at the time)
Morikazu Aoki. RSE OST has three composers in total (the same ones as GSC).

>>57998394 (OP)
Nintendo as a whole was seeing a drop off in popularity at the time because a lot of gamers determined a game's quality by its visuals and they were deemed too "kiddy." Consumer aesthetics in the 2000s largely shifted towards darker themes that reflected a sense of lost innocence after 9/11. Not to mention this was the first new generation since Pokemania burned out so the bandwagoners moved on and shamed people for still enjoying it because it was old news and kiddyshit. Not to mention growing sentiments among casuals that GF was running out of ideas and that there were too many pokemon. The truth of the matter is that Gen 3 was made with their core audience in mind and its reflected both in the game's design, as well as features that were introduced in the game that catered to people who stuck it out like the Battle Frontier. It was also a fairly experimental time in the series as well as a soft reboot and with 9/11 fresh in everyone's minds at the time people just wanted a sense of normalcy and change was often met with hostility. Just look at the reaction to Wind Waker when it wad revealed and compare against how it's remembered today. Another example of a good game's reputation getting snubbed by audience's tastes being influenced by geopolitics and trends.

>>57998485
You’re cherrypicking. Gen 3 added other overworld effects and mechanics that get overlooked pretty often.

>>57999379
To be fair, the backlash was as much due to reaction of the demo of Link battling Ganondorf and the assumption that was going to be the style for the next Zelda game (which had a knock-on in TP being that style of game, but launching too late and being ported to Wii also).

>>57998976
If you have Gold and Silver but no Gen I game, you can still get missing stones through using Mystery Gift with each other.

Red and Green together get 150/151 without glitches or distribution, and 124 on a standalone copy.
Gold and Silver together get 232/251, and 199 on a standalone copy.
Ruby and Sapphire together get 200/386, and 177 (Ruby) or 178 (Sapphire) on a standalone copy.

>>57999456
TP had a middling reception, but its Link was used for marketing and promotion for a long, long time. I don’t think it got changed until TotK came out.

>>57998913
This. FRLG is the aesthetically superior Gen 3 game.

>>57998998
>FRLG are soulless
Spotted the guy with the bad taste

>>57999393
This, reflections in the water, steps/tire tracks in the sand, the revamped Safari Game with pokeblock feeders to influence natures, natures to begin with, abilities, the modern EV/IV system, berry revamp including the farming system, contests, double battles, two bikes with different obstacles they can be used to traverse in the OW, the first new evil teams since the series began, completely new region separate from the previous 2, the 2nd highest number of new pokemon at the time of its release, 3rd as of Gen 5, the battle frontier,Gen 3 was fantastic if you weren't a bandwagoning fag.
>>57999456
I genuinely think this attitude is what killed Nintendo's interest in showing prerelease builds of games. Considering how many autists were clinging to the GameCube's tech demos like the Zelda one and Super Mario 128, I wouldn't be shocked if Nintendo noticed people shitting on the actual releases and crying for unfinished prototypes and took it as a sign to avoid showing off stuff before it's finalized so their audience doesn't get hung up on "what could've been" when it definitely couldn't have.

>>57999559
There are no trade shows anymore, so Nintendo just shows their console when it's ready and already has games that are 90% complete.

>>57998394 (OP)
looked like shit
sounded like shit
pokémon look like digimon
story was shit
no backwards compatibility

God I miss pre Go Pokemon so much

>>57998954
>Gen 4 and the explosion of the DS as well as wifi sort of saved it until it really came back later.
I feel like I’m in fucking bizarro land because I never saw anyone care about pokemon after the fad died up until Gen 6 and PoGo came out. I distinctly element Gen 4 getting its fair share of shit for its designs up until nostalgiafags creamed their pants for HGSS.

>>58000319
everyone had and played diamond and pearl when the DS lite came out. I rarely saw gen 4 get shit outside of my older brother complaining that there were "too many mons now". Now ADHD zoomers complain that its too slow now lol

>>57999379
schizo post

>>58000343
>too many mons now
Yeah, I remember hearing that a lot too. But it definitely wasn’t this resurgence or series savior. Not even close.

>>57998407
In my age group, most of the kids with older brothers had hand me down copies of gen 3 games. At least in my experience, until platinum came out, gen 3 and gen 4 were both played about as often.
t. 2000

>>57999624
>Looked like shit
Better graphics than the gameboy
>Sounded like shit
subjective
>Pokemon look like Digimon
You say that like that's a bad thing
>The story was shit
At least they tried something original
>No backwards comp
Fair.

>>58000353
>Not even close.
Dude, these are facts (I'm excluding Switch era sales because they're a) irrelevant to the discussion and b) inflated by the ludicrous system sales):
>Diamond and Pearl are the third-best selling paired versions of Pokemon behind only Red/Green(Blue) and Gold/Silver, the Pokemania generations
>outsold Ruby/Sapphire by almost 2 million lifetime units
>were the starters of the generation that made HG/SS the best selling remakes (and for a time they were the tenth-best selling entries in the series)
And because they were DS games, they attracted many of the now-grown up fans back to the series who already had DSes. College kids who were 8-10 during Pokemania rediscovered the games and played them with friends, this was incredibly common to see. Even if it was only briefly (as Gen 5 meant Pokemon was forgotten again), it set the stage for the huge launch of X/Y, because it brought Pokemon back into people's minds.
It wasn't the huge push that's occurred in the Switch era but it was the first pulse after international sales had flatlined.

>>58000885
Not to mention that a lot of what it introduced was wildly popular, especially Arceus. You have all the curmudgeons that arbitrarily draw a line at Gen IV's legendaries saying there are too many (there are 9 which is the same as Gen III) and they jumped the shark because some represent deities (when Groudon, Kyogre, and Rayquaza are literally based on biblical monsters). Of course back then, nobody in the west differentiated between Mythical and Legendary. But even if Gen IV has more Mythical Pokémon than Gen III, how is that a bad thing? Even ignoring that they require real life events, I LIKE the GS Ball event. I LIKE the Eon Ticket, Mystic Ticket, Aurora Ticket, and Old Sea Map. I LIKE Southern Island, Navel Rock, and Faraway Island. There is a reason kids used to think that you could take the Mossdeep Space Center rocket to the moon once it reached enough launches, where you could find Jirachi or Deoxys. It's because finding a special Pokémon in a special place under special conditions is FUN. And not only that, but Gen IV was the first time they started doing events over Wi-Fi. You didn't have to be Japanese or be in New York. Even nowadays, Gen IV's events can easily be done at any time, which cannot be said for Gen III. When they stopped doing these cool events with items and story content and switched to lazy distributions, I stopped caring. No kid wants LESS content, yet people who whine about Gen IV complain that it just can't be done (by the way nobody says this for later games where there's more, but it's done with far less care).

And then the complainers start grasping at straws, like "There aren't enough Fire-types in DP's regional Pokédex" or "It's too slow, my turn-based JRPG is being hindered". Why do people act like Platinum speeding up surfing speed is this life-changing enhancement? You hardly surf in Sinnoh to begin with, it's not Hoenn.

But I will also be forever thankful that the DS dropped all those annoying accessories.

>>58000885
>Dude, these are facts
lmao, no they're not. You deliberately excluding the Switch sales to try and prove your narrative is fucking hilarious though. Saying the sales were inflated due to the system is even better. The NDS sold nearly the same amount of units as the Switch, yet the games sold much worse than the Switch-era ones. Also, if older people from Gen 1 and 2 were returning to the series you'd see a much bigger boost in sales than 10-15% from RS (which was sold on a system that had a little bit over half of what the NDS sold as well).
>it set the stage for the huge launch of X/Y
A game that released 7 years before XY set the stage for it? Really? After BW sold less? Now it seems like you're the one living in bizarro land. You make it sound like DP was actually released right before XY. Utterly laughable.

>>58001041
>>58000885
And finally I want to say just how many Pokémon you can obtain in DP alone is far above any Gen III game, especially RS. Together they're somewhere around 440+, and alone they're just under 360. And it's not like how later games like Kalos just dump 15 Pokémon as grass encounters on one route, there are all these mechanics and methods like dual-slot mode, swarms, the Poké Radar, and post-gane upgrades to the Underground, Great Marsh, Trophy Garden, not to mention all the newly unlocked areas. Masuda says the goal of Gen IV was to be the ultimate Pokémon experience, hence the name Diamond, and that he planned it as far back as Gold and Silver. And it's apparent to see why with how much stuff they do and how much they bring back and refine. Not only do they bring back day/night and the day of the week, they do so much more with it. Just about every route or town has both a day theme and night theme, the wild battle theme changes (this happened for Gen II Johto too, but it's not as obvious), the visual changes are more gradual, there are all these time-based mechanics. People don't give DP their due credit, not realizing that the majority of what they like about Platinum was made for DP, and Platinum merely refined some things and added some stuff. Inversely, people fellate Emerald and hardly acknowledge Ruby and Sapphire as ever having existed and treat their significant issues as not mattering. The Pokémon fan narrative is utter nonsense.

>>58001051
Pokémon pre-GO and post-GO is two entirely different beasts. You have no idea just how much it boosted sales for the franchise.

>>58001064
>You have no idea just how much it boosted sales for the franchise.
That is literally part of the discussion here.

>>58001072
I'm saying that post-GO games (in this case, Switch Pokémon games) have inflated sales. Pokémon's sales history is pretty apparent.
>Initial pairs of a Generation sell the highest
>Followed by remakes
>Followed by third versions
Gen I sold 30+ million because it was a social phenomenon
Gen II sold a very respectable 20+ million as the phenomenon was winding down
By Crystal it was nowhere near what it was, but 6 million is still pretty good for a game
Ruby and Sapphire likewise did pretty solid, even if they were like half of Gen II
Diamond and Pearl was several million more, and part of that was due to being on very popular hardware
Black and White was at the end of the DS' lifespan though still did very well, they would have sold closer to DP or more if they released in 2009/2010.
X and Y did solid, somewhat hindered by the 3DS having half the sales.
Sun and Moon released the same year as GO and were the 20th anniversary, they almost outsold X and Y despite them having a 3 year headstart.
Sword and Shield sold gangbusters being in a post-GO world.
Scarlet and Violet have outsold Sword and Shield despite being on the same hardware three years later, and the insanely long lifespan of the Switch is probably to thank for that.

Pokémon tends to grow a bit with each successive generational leap, with the age of the hardware and events in the franchise contributing. I think it was foolish to release BW outside Asia the same month NoA released the 3DS. Even if the 3DS is backwards compatible, nobody is buying one to play Pokémon, everyone already had a DS, and the cost of the 3DS was prohibitive at launch and they would likely cannibalize each other's sales. DS games didn't even look good on the original 3DS, but no one would have known that at the time.

>>58001104
>I'm saying that post-GO games (in this case, Switch Pokémon games) have inflated sales
It's also present in SM, where they sold much quicker before petering out... but that's the entire argument here. The advent of 3D models preceding PoGo caused the resurgence of the series which is why everything about it is much bigger now. Previously the games were effectively coasting through.

>>58001072
No, it isn't you fucking retard. The "debate" was about whether or not Gen 4 was a mini-revival for the series after Gen 3 sold well but had Pokemon on cultural life support. Whether or not some shit game sold better 20 years on is irrelevant.
And they are facts, acting like fucking yawnfag for no reason is just pathetic and stupid.

You're clearly too young to have actually witnessed what was happening with Pokemon in the late 2000s through the eyes of someone who isn't the main audience, which is fine but stop pretending you're some authority.

The actual fact of the matter, as in what happened in chronological order is:
Pokemania ends > RS sells well but has very little cultural impact unless you were a small child > DP improves the sales figures from last gen and reignites franchise interest, even if only for a few years. This is because it released on a console everyone owned and had cool new features and a nostalgic tint for the now adult genwunners
GO boosted sales exponentially but not for Gen 7 oddly, it literally took the combination of Switch + GO + COVID to set sales records on the nuslop games

And before citing raw sales numbers of the GBA and DS, think of the audiences they each brought in.
The GBA was the only handheld in town, and everyone who played games seriously owned or wanted one.
The DS was seriously challenged by the PSP for four years or so, but managed to oursell everything else by appealing to casual players.... The kinds of people who played Pokemon as kids and then didn't "follow" gaming much afterwards, but who got a DS because all their friends were playing Nintendogs.

>>58001120
>Whether or not some shit game sold better 20 years on is irrelevant.
Except it isn't irrelevant, retard. You don't get to whine and cry about something being not allowed just because you want to lie about a shitty point you want to make.
>You're clearly too young to have actually witnessed what was happening with Pokemon in the late 2000s through the eyes of someone who isn't the main audience
I've lived through pokemania and I've probably been aware of the games longer than you've been alive, mongoloid. Eat shit.
>> DP improves the sales figures from last gen and reignites franchise interest, even if only for a few years
Except it didn't, retard. It was a par-for-the-course release boosted by the DS' absolutely massive install base. And acting like a fucking 15% sales boost from the previous gen is somehow this massive change is ridiculous. Get the fuck out of here.

>>58001130
What the fuck are you even babbling about you fucking moron? I'm not reading your screed if you can't even illustrate why the sales of some Switch game have any bearing on whether or not one Pokemon game from 15 years ago outsold the one from 20 years ago.

Also, you're a fucking angry little bitchmade faggot having a hissy fit over absolutely nothing. I don't give a fuck that you're 45 and seething over schizo delusions.
Maybe if you weren't such a fucking loser you wouldn't have drank yourself to wetbrain stupidity, but who knows?

>>58001134
You cannot be this fucking dense. Holy shit.
>I'm not reading blah blah blah
Yeah, I know. You clearly can't comprehend basic wording in the first place. Get the fuck out of here.

>passive-aggressive seething
I accept your concession.

>>58001146
I know you think you're tough, talking like a Sopranos character but it's very embarrassing.
Do you have a point or did your bussy just get torn? Why are you so mad? You literally have never once actually linked up the assertion that Switch games outselling DS games invalidates the idea that DP outsold RS and represented a small victory and comeback for Pokemon the franchise.
What's it like being so stupid that you can't make a coherent argument, and yet you post this braggadocious shit?

>>58001156
>>58001148
>>58001146
>>58001143
>>58001134
this is too much mentall illnesses . its very true xy shitted and flopped the pokemon franchise forever albeit
Market size
2002: 75.36 billion yen
2003: 88.91 billion yen
2004: 80.13 billion yen
2005: 65.20 billion yen
2006: 112.77 billion yen <- DP
2007: 134.02 billion yen
2008: 114.93 billion yen
2009: 111.81 billion yen
2010: 114.48 billion yen <- BW
2011: 117.60 billion yen
2012: 92.04 billion yen
2013: 86.98 billion yen <- XY
2014: 71.82 billion yen
2015: 55.26 billion yen
2016: 63.52 billion yen <- SM
2017: 64.58 billion yen
2018: 77.42 billion yen
2019: 101.06 billion yen <- SWSH
2020: 91.33 billion yen
2021: 112.61 billion yen

I don't think there's a dark period for Pokemon in the first place

>>58001156
>but it's very embarrassing.
...coming from the guy gnashing his teeth and making passive-aggressive posts on a mongolian basket-weaving forum? You're a funny guy.
>What's it like being so stupid that you can't make a coherent argument
lmao

>>58001156
your arguments seems to boil down to
>look these sales mean this game made everyone like pokemon again
>no, sales figures don’t match up with what you’re saying
>yes they do
>no they don’t

>>58001161
The alluded to "dark age" was in terms of cultrual relevance. Of course any franchise out there wishes it could pull Gen 3 numbers easily.
Main thing was simply the visibility of the series outside of Japan. It will never be Pokemania again but in the immediate aftermath of the fad people mostly acted like they wanted to forget about Pokemon on the whole. People maybe got the games, but they didn't interact with the franchise otherwise, merch and TCG sales/participation was much reduced and for something like Pokemon that positioned itself as a multimedia franchise, that wasn't great. Even if their market was totally contracting (new kids are born every day), they weren't growing it at a sustainable rate since people kept "outgrowing" the franchise. Turning it truly evergreen meant appealing to the masses with nostalgia (now) or appealing social features (DP, XY, GO)

my brother played gen 1/2 and i had played them a little as a kid, mostly pokemon stadium with my brother. my first pokemon game i personally owned was sapphire and i loved. i still love gen 1-4 and can replay any 1-4 game and find enjoyment. i dont remember anyone hating gen 3 when i was a kid

>>57998394 (OP)
i was expecting to have a johto/kanto post-game segment and felt cheated there was no post-game at all
it seemed like they had to cut back on so many features to implement stuff i didn't really care about

>>57998446
Yup. I got Red, wanted Gold or Silver but never got it. Didn't care by Ruby and Sapphire. I watched the anime but stopped at some point during Advanced. Then I wanted Emerald in middle school and then normie kids picked Pokemon back up in high school but I didn't want to ask my mom for over $200 for a DS and a gen 4 game and I stopped caring about Pokemon again until Pokemon Go came out, but I never played it but I did start coming onto this board after getting into ROMhacks.

>>57999079
>Kids gave up on the TV show when Ash lost to Blaziken and boxed his old Pokemon.
They gave up well before that.

it wasn't tho??

>>58002649
what OP should've said is polarizing, which is not unique to Gen 3 anymore, every generation since has been the same

*ahem*

>>57998402
fpbp

Not to mention the early 00's was PEAK EDGY phase of for gaming. Shooting, gore, sex, and violence where all teenagers wanted in games. Anything else was considered kiddy shit that you'd be called a faggot if anyone found out you played.

>>57998421
I love seeing old game journalism. You can really tell they cared back then.

>>57998482
'94 guy here too. I had the exact same experience and feelings- and hold the same opinions as you too. It's scary just how similar we are.

>>57998488
Nobody likes that aspect of the series. Gen4 innovated AND brought back features, so there was probably some discontent about it among Game Freak too. It probably would not even be a thing if it weren't for Masuda. He orginally wanted Gen3 to have only new pokémon but was running out of time due to most of development going into redoing the engine and realized it was a dumb idea anyway.

who gets paid to bump these threads

>>57998420
>XY kinda brought back some normies playing it when they were in uni/out of high school
LOL no. It was still just the dedicated autists doing it back then. I was in university at the time- and one of the "odd" things I was known for was playing Gen4 in my NDS. I knew only two other guys who played Pokémon back then, one Gen6 and the other Gen3, and they both kept it secret. GO is what changed everything.

>>58001497
>didn't get the $100 SoulSilver+DSLite+case at Walmart
NGMI

>>58004682
Who pays you to be a bitch?

>>57998394 (OP)
It was a soft dexit so genwunners had to hate it. Also, the original Pokemania had already died down.

>>57998919
Miss this era, take me back bros. People said what they wanted to say and the mass retardation hadn't taken hold yet

>>58000319
All my friends had a ds and a copy of either diamond or pearl. I remember one friend eventually got soulsilver and we would constantly trade sinnoh for johto/kanto pokemons. One of my friends had a copy of ruby and we would ask him for hoenn mons. I lovsed how compatible dp and hgss were. Everyone lost interest with black and white cus noone liked the new pokemons

>>58004899
No, it's because the DS in 2010/2011 was at the end of its life, it was like the 3DS in 2018. Pokémon was still popular, and people will always find reasons to say they've grown out of it, no matter how vapid those reasons sound compared to the actual facts of the matter. People were just moving onto smartphones.

>>57998394 (OP)
from what i remember it was partially the gen1/2 audience aging out (wow you still play pokemon?), and that a lot of people who liked the gen1/2 mons didn't want to learn a whole new cast of pokemon.

>>57998394 (OP)
>Gen 3 hated on launch
You can cherry pick whatever you want, but Gen III was not hated on launch.

>>58005465
Yeah, no, back then half the people said wow, this is pretty much the same thing but better, pass, half the people said wow, I actually played the game, and it was really good.

>>57998402
This is true, but what OP probably meant is why Gen III was disliked by Pokemon fans, not normies.

To me it was because of the sudden change in the aesthetic. Gen II was a pretty smooth continuation of Gen I, while RS took a drastically different direction, cutting most of its ties to the past. Gen III Pokemon looked somewhat odd compared to the ones from two previous gens, they were described as being "Digimon-like". The game allowed you to get only a selection of old Pokemon, leaving many people's favorites unobtainable (at least before the advent of FRLG and GameCube spinoffs), backward compatibility was cut, making Hoenn seem detached from the rest of Pokemon world and while the ties to Kanto were re-estabilished by FRLG, Johto felt left out unloved. The game also removed many of the liked features, such as the day/night cycle or aforementioned backwards compatibility, as well as worldbuilding elements like Apricorn Balls.Of course, it also added a lot of great new features that would become standard, but while Gen II felt like it was built perfectly atop of Gen I without removing anything, Gen III felt like built on Gen II's ruins.

To be honest, I didn't fully "accept" Gen III until DPPt (and especially HGSS) came. Gen IV was like getting a missing piece of the puzzle, it made things "click" in my head and now I'm looking at the first four gens (AKA the "Japanese region") as a full picture, the "classic Pokemon era". And the subsequent gens pushed changes in the aesthetics and Pokemon's "philosophy" even further, reinforcing that feel even more.

But yeah, when RS first came out I was pretty disappointed with it and still stuck with GSC and Stadium 2 for a longer while.

>>58000343
>Now ADHD zoomers complain that its too slow now lol
Shitnoh was always deathly slow to the point of killing the game, this isn't a recent observation

I really liked Ruby and Sapphire, but as soon as I finished it, all I could think was, "that's it? It's over?" It wasn't a bad game at all, it had a lot of great features, but at the same time, gen 2 set certain, maybe unrealistic standards into a person's mind. I don't think the delusional desire of a game with all the regions and battle facilities and minigames and basically making a Pokemon world simulator would exist to the same degree if Gen 2 didn't plant that idea in the heads of kids. So while even if it was good, it sort of felt like a roadblock to this concept of Gamefreak making an unrealistically perfect game.

>>58005606
if shinnoh games were so slow that it "killed the game" then you shouldn't be playing rpgs. This was a non-issue pre 2020

>>58005617
Not that guy but Sinnoh being slow has been meme’d for a long, long time. Way earlier than 2020. I’m not sure why 2020 is even referenced considering it massively boosted sales of gen 8 which had much worse tedious handholding going on iirc