>>29894288People hate it now, but at the time playing the game and the fisherman telling you that there where a bunch of remoraid on a route and you are like "what the fuck is a remoraid" was an amazing feeling, same with discovering that there's still new pokémon to discover on Kanto like slugma, larvitar, misdreavous and all that.
Sure most gen 2 rare pokémon where pretty bad but it was amazing seeing something weird like wobufett and discovering what it does, I still remember my brother training dunsparce hoping that it would be awesome only to find out its last move was on level 35.