>>18069729Look, you want the quick and dirty of it?
Gen 3's pretty good. It gets a lot of hate, I'd imagine because as the third generation it's when a lot of people started thinking "oh boy, another hundred-however-the-fuck-many pokemon to learn, these designs suck, fuck this game."
Personally, I think the designs from Gen 3 are pretty good, and their enduring popularity is a testament to that. For instance, Gardevoir, Metagross, Aggron, and Absol are all from Gen 3.
Pokemon designs aside, the plots were definitely impressive for their time - in Gens 1 and 2 you saw Rocket corruption threaten to take over certain locales, but Gen 3 was the first game that really dealt with the fate of the world, and the drought/flood sequence really drives that home. Playing Sapphire and having to surf along all the routes you've gotten so used to walking on because Kyogre's flooded the world was a level of world influence previously unheard of in Pokemon, and emphasized the idea that these legendaries were true forces of nature to be reckoned with.
Finally, Dive was a cool mechanic. Having the 8th city be a secluded hidden island you could only get to by swimming through a cave at the bottom of the ocean had a certain level of intrigue to it.
Bottom line is if it's your shit it's your shit, if it's not it's not. Arguments for any particular generation are going to be rooted in opinion. I thought learning Braille to uncover the secrets of the Regis was cool, other people thought it was stupid. It's all personal preference.
