>>21375912It is hard to compare other games to gen2 as gen2 had remakes already so you end up making comparisons to 2 different games. This is what I will say however:
The original game on GBC was still subject to much of the same endgame boredom as Red and Blue and some features such as the Safari Zone were even removed. Rematches were implemented poorly compared to gen3 and as a result you can only really rematch the Elite Four, who actually have lower levels than in gen1. Kanto is totally watered down and is actually not the same size as in gen1. Many of the dungeons are simply not there anymore and the trainers are too easy to defeat. Team Rocket actually feels unfinished, with no named NPCs. They appear in areas that are already used for other things, like the overworld and Radio Tower(the exception being the relatively small Mahogany Town base), and then disappear forever.
HGSS fixed some of these problems, but of course, HGSS came years later and should be compared to the games around that time. It was followed up by BW and BW2 which did the whole "revisit the old region" thing in a way that didn't involve watering anything down. Also, HGSS still has problems with trainer rematching and its frontier is the same one from Platinum, which is generally considered to be weaker than Emeralds. And that was followed up by the World Tournament in BW2.
Because of that, I say BW2 > HGSS and a lot of the other games have surpassed it various areas. Platinum was also a very good game that stands toe to toe with HGSS.
