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I remember playing SoulSilver when I was much, much younger.
I had just finished getting my entire team in White, my first Pokemon game ever, to level 100 because I thought I was the only one who had ever thought of doing that, so I was a genius and my brother and sister could never beat me. I didn't know HGSS came out before BW, because I found my copy of SS long after playing White.
I had a terrible experience with SoulSilver. Like, really bad. I thought it was slow, boring, no reusable TMs sucked, and it had no Pokemon I knew of and all of them looked less cool than those in White. I ended up dropping the game before the 4th gym. This unpleasant feeling stuck with me for a very long
Now for the kicker. I recently came back to my old save file, and found out that the reason 7 year old me stopped playing was because I was stuck at Sudowoodo and didn't understand how to get past. I had been stuck in the beginning areas of the game and didn't know how to get further into the actual game. Embarassed at my past self, I decided to go on a redemption arc, starting over and ACTUALLY playing the game, giving it the real chance it had deserved for so long.
Guess what. I still didn't enjoy it all that much. I did almost everything most casual players would do, the League, Kanto, Red battle, legendary catching. And yet, it felt dull. The game was still slow af due to gen 4's performance issues, the story was one of the least interesting of the games I had played in the series, and some of the mechanics like the non reusable TMs and HM spam made some parts of the game incredibly frustrating.
