>>11889917It's more than that. The first pokemon was a completely new concept, at least in the mainstream and popular imagination.
The idea of an RPG based around a fixed bestiary, from which both the player and all opponents were drawn freely, was very much new, at least in the west. America's big RPGs at the time were, as I recall, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and other games of that variety, where the player's party was a pretty fixed pool of roles which were customized to deal with the variety of enemies and bosses.
Pokemon's core gameplay mechanic was totally different in that regard, since it took the logic of card games like Magic (or whatever people played back then), which was semirandom collection and organization to build a strategy out of what one had, but set in an RPG format.
Gen I will always be more memorable for the same reason a game like the original Super Mario Bros will always be more memorable, whether it was your first or not: because it established the format for all that followed.
