>>37578695We can never go back. Monster collecting wasn't a new concept back then, but it was certainly delivered in a way most people had never seen before. Before then it was primarily toylines that you had to continue to buy into just to collect them all, and maybe a cheap show with an extremely limited few as recurring characters. But Pokemon? All you had to do was fork over thirty bucks and you had something you could invest your time in, something you could explore, craft your own world in your head around. It was so new and fresh, and the fact that it was framed as children around our age getting access to these things, the power to shape their world with their Pokemon.
We'll never get that sense of mystery again, either. The internet certainly existed back in 1998, but it was a much different animal and much fewer of us had open access to it. There weren't people datamining the whole fucking game two days before release, or at least not out in the open where anyone could find it and spoil every single mystery the game had to offer. It was a hell of a time, a time where fucking "pokegods" felt in the realm of possibility. You know I'm actually a Sinnohfag now, and you wanna know why? Because gens III and IV both had a bunch of legendaries and mythicals that took snooping and exploring to find, or did some weird shit to encounter.
>the braille puzzles to find the regi>climbing that fucking tower to reach Rayquaza>the strange rock on Birth Island>writing the name of your waifu on a rock to make Flower Paradise appear>sleeping in a strange-ass inn to fight Darkrai in your nightmares>summoning a stairway to heaven to fight godI dare you to try and tell me this isn't the same kinda shit you'd hear about on the playground during pokemania. And we'll never see anything like it again because Gamefreak is butthurt about the internet digging it up.