>>41458081It's mostly through contrast to everything that came after.
I like gen 5 for sure, but it has a lot of flaws. Teams tend to be smaller and easier (though the game as a whole still has challenging fights), you were constantly bombarded with story which was good sometimes, but it could also be really grating (the shithead rival you have in B2W2, Cheren and Bianca weren't particularly pleasant either, pokestar studios, etc), and it didn't have a proper Battle Frontier. Don't get me wrong, the PWT was cool and all, but it's not a proper stand-in for a Battle Frontier.
But then compare it to everything after; basically all of the future games compound on the faults in gen 5 exponentially
>Casualization>Obnoxiously constant story/cutscenes/hand holding/etc.>less and less endgame contentHowever, I think they stand on their own a bit as well, the online felt a lot more refined than in gen 4, I thought the Dream World stuff was neat and it was a way to get hidden abilities which is always a good thing, and I like Unova as a region.
tl;dr They still feel like games Game Freak cared about making, which can't be said for any mainline titles after.
