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Revisiting FireRed and Soul Silver last year cemented a nearly 180 opinion change on gen 1 and gen 2.
Genwunners have a point when it comes to nothing else since the original having the same kind of experience, and FRLG in particular take the gen 3 additions and fuck up Kanto's general progression with it in really funny ways. I was really surprised coming out of FireRed really digging it, although I still don't really care that much about the original 151 I respect em a bit more. FireRed feels less like a pokemon game and more like baby's first jrpg, which sounds redundant but I mostly only played pokemon games growing up and as an adult have been going out of my way to play all sorts of games I never would have looked at as a kid.
Meanwhile gen 2, Crystal especially was the game that got kid me seriously invested in Pokemon, but especially HGSS get glazed way too hard for things that are primarily vibes and are entirely in service to being attached to Kanto. So much of Johto feels undercooked and the remakes were way too faithful in ways they shouldnt have been, and their fixes for stuff like the pokemon distribution being entirely postgame or attached to a dumb peripheral are wack and annihilate their replay value. People praised following pokemon like the second coming of christ and I cannot think of a more useless feature honestly.
This is turning into a blog rip, cont.
