What you guys have to understand is that, for those of us who were there from the beginning of the Red/Blue craze, we spent several years of our lives basically living in the world of Pokemon. We fought in the schoolyards, we traded at sleepovers, we obsessed over everything having to do with the games.
So for a sequel to come out and deliver on all the things that GSC did - More Pokemon! Color graphics! Held items! Day/night cycle and events specific to certain days of the week! - was mind-blowingly awesome. And then, to top it all off, to find out after you've beaten the game that you can actually go back to Kanto and revisit the world that you just spent the last few years living in, to see how it developed and changed, and how all the old faces are doing? That was fucking orgasm-inducing lunacy. Who cared that the gyms were dull? You got to see the world again. No other game that I can think of allowed you to do that so directly in the sequels.
So a big part of what made GSC so great was the combination of a solid nostalgiagasm and improving, in literally every way, a game series that we little kiddos thought could get no better.
>>29887058One of the things that disappointed me most about Ruby and Sapphire was how much they felt like a step down from GSC - all of a sudden there was no day/night cycle, no days of the week, no moving Pokemon animations at the beginning of combat, no real postgame, and most importantly, a lot of missing Pokemon due to the inability to transfer your old buddies forward to the newer games. I remember feeling like RS were Pokemon 1.5 instead of the Pokemon 3 that they should have been; though most or all of these issues were fixed in later games (thanks based Emerald), GSC were great in retrospect because of exactly how well they improved on the originals, in a way that RS never came close to.
