>>32926683Some people just dislike Gen 3 with a passion because it was when Pokémania fully died (some will argue it died in Gen 2 but it was still a lot bigger in GSC than after RS hit). Pokémon stopped being "cool" and some people who still played the games had to hide the fact that they still liked it.
I remember when HGSS came out. I was still in high school, but suddenly a mini-Pokémania shot up again, and everyone I talked to realized that everyone else had still played Pokémon after it stopped being cool but just kept it to themselves or only talked about it with one or two people that they knew also played. I personally had a "Gen 3 and Sinnoh are bad" phase for that reason but ended up really liking Emerald and Platinum after revisiting them. Some people let the context around the games' initial release taint the games themselves though. I'm not saying everyone who dislikes Gen 3 dislikes it for that reason of course, but I feel some of the blind hatred is because of that.
