>>56588547A big source of BW's criticism at the time was that the Pokemon designs were not as appealing as the older ones. Trubbish and Vanillish in particular got singled out. And since the region only featured new Pokemon, a lot of Pokemon that filled the archetypes of older Pokemon just ended up looking like cheap knock-offs of older Pokemon (Patrat -> Rattata, Zubat -> Woobat, Machop -> Timburr, etc.). Then you have other aspects, like the region being a just a circle, the animations looking really awkward, removing following Pokemon from HGSS.
It's also worth mentioning that gen 4 did get its fair share of criticism too. A lot of people didn't like the designs of the cross-gen evolutions (particularly Rhyperior) and even Pokemon like Garchomp and the legendary Pokemon were seen as overdesigned (and some people thought that they were adding too many new legendaries in each game in general, reducing their value). The fact that online discussion was becoming more popular around that period probably just meant that people who had "grown out of the series" simply had a bigger platform to share their complaints.
