>>44276694I will defend ALL base games till the day I die, bar XY and partially DP they're all great games that people retroactively decided were bad after an obviously better version raised their standards.What people DON'T realize in that the only reason shit like Emerald and Platinum are so amazing is because they have actual YEARS of additional dev time to make miniscule changes. Like games like platinum and Emerald aren't a fair standard to hold base games to because the dev not only had the gift of almost double the original games dev time, but also the gift of hindsight and having nearly 100% of the actual creative process already out of the way. Seriously fuck everyone who says DP are shit for not having the battle frontier like Emerald had when emerald effectively had way more dev time and most of the heavy lifting being done a full 2 or so years before release and same for BW and Platinum and so on. Fact of the matter is most of the base games are fairly impressive given the resources and time GF was working with for each, and they manage to pull off innovation to the formula quite well, like, it's actually amazing how for most the first 5 gens every change to the formula was good enough to be kept around, shit like abilities and other gen 3 changes were EXTREMELY risky in terms of balance so the fact that it all worked out shows how good gamefreak was at thinking shit through at least at the time, which is why I'll always think RS and GS are literally the best pokemon games, they both innovated so fucking much and experimented with new ideas so much and gamefreak really knocked it out of the park each time.
I'd rank base games like so based on how well they did at establishing their gen and making the gens innovations.
1. GS
2. RS (Very close behind GS, almost a tie really)
3. BW
4.DP (Kinda a rocky start for gen 4 but they're still good)
5. SM (Solid games in their own way really, I just don't like gen 7)
6. XY (oof lol)
7. SwSh
