>>32277850I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
I've been doing a run of Expert Emerald with a nonsense team (right now it's Furret, Linoone, Masquerain, Grovyle, Donphan, and Doduo) and it's been a struggle due to lack of coverage and being consistently underleveled (deliberately.) But because it's been so stupidly hard, I've wound up surprisingly attached to these Pokemon for the first time in a long time. I don't even think I got this attached to my team in games where I could actually interact with them in Amie. It's been my comfiest runthrough of anything in ages, and I can't seem to recapture that in the newer gens.
And honestly, I think that the fact that so much of the newer generations are tied to the internet and become inaccessible (mostly) once the servers shut down. In the older games, there's still The Frontier, or the Pokeathalon, Contests, all kinds of little things I can keep doing if I bother to open the game, but they've all kind of fell to the wayside in the newer gens. Gen 5 might be the worst one off; the entire bottom screen is mostly useless now that the online features are gone -- the Dream World, the Entralink, Black City/White Forest, and everything else. Gen 6 had some of the best online features we've ever seen but once they shut down, Kalos is going to be literally barren after the credits roll. Bike Simulator can only keep you going for so long.
]I still love the games, but sometimes they feel melancholic to play, in a way, because at the end of the day
I can't recapture the magic of growing up with them.>>32277868It can be really nice sometimes, and honestly, I liked them. I would have killed a man to have Secret Bases in them, it would have been perfect for the region -- but in all, I did like them, and I love a lot of the route music. The games are far from flawless, but I don't regret my purchase at the end of the day.
