Quoted By:
Map design it's hands down the best, once you get the water bottle to give to the police officer the map becomes a giant + for most main locations around that point in the game when it finally opens up till badge 7 and 8 which are closer to the beginning of the game. Most recent games are literal railroading circles when gen 1 let you do 3-4 gyms in almost any desired order.
Legendary pokemon are designed out of the way instead of being part of the plot allowing more focus on the main goal of the game which is to get the badges, this makes actually going out the way for the ice cave and the power plant to find the 2 birds in them feel extra accomplishing because you never had to go there but you went into bonus dungeons and are rewarded with chances to catch some strong birds and mewtwos post game dungeon added to that since it's you still playing after credits and doing something harder then the main game to get this super good pokemon.
The villain team is just there and never pushed in your face to learn their motivation and just stop them when you happen to find them along the story, in gen 4 you had to faff about going to multiple lakes and then climb a shit mountain to fight a team that recruits trainers with level 40+ Wurmples isn't enjoyable.
Difficulty wise I think it's the hardest main game since I'm always high 30's to low 40's when the elite 4 start out like level 53ish when in later games I seem to match or outclass the elite four in levels.
HM's were more tolerable in this game since surf and fly were pretty good moves for the main story (INB4 muh fly isn't good in competitive as if I implied that) but also being the first game it could be tied to a meh idea and not a cancer idea that the series held on to and continued to make worse for like 20 years.
Issues I'd say it has are mostly due to shoddy and less optimized coding leading to glitched attacks and the like and also why gen 2 can fit a large amount of gen 1 in it.
continued...
