>>42408516RS definitely has issues. Pokémon being outright impossible to obtain legitimately was only seen with Mew and Celebi. When RS released, that number was 186.
>Ruby and Sapphire are released November 21st, 2002>1 (Jirachi) took just over 6 months (June 1st, 2003)) to become available>67 (from Colosseum) took a year (November 21st, 2003) to become available>2 (Scizor and by extension Scyther through Colosseum's e-Reader cards) took 13 months (December 25th, 2003)>113 (from FRLG) took about 14 months (January 29th, 2004)>1 (Deoxys from FRLG) took about 19 months (June 19th, 2004)>1 (Lugia from FRLG) took about 20 months (July 17th, 2004)>1 (Mew) took about 31 months (June 25th, 2005)While Sword and Shield technically have more Pokémon even before any updates, even without trading, I think that Ruby and Sapphire were probably the more impressive games considering
>They completely overhauled the data structure to its modern incarnation>Every single previous Pokémon sprite, front and back, was remade, which I think is more impressive than updating textures and making minor adjustments to existing models>A good amount of the world before the surfing routes has pretty great design>They designed more Pokémon>The graphical leap was more impressive than just upping the resolutionThat being said, they don't look particularly great for GBA games, their audio quality is terrible and genre variety is pretty low, the level design falls apart at the ocean, the plot tries to just be serviceable but is still nonsense, etc. Like I think you can feel more from Sword and Shield's story even if it's also dumb. But Sword and Shield has more glaring issues like its linearity, lack of meaningful content (though dumb post-game is still probably better than RS's lack of one). But the difference overall is that I don't think Sword and Shield excel in ANYTHING, being subpar in most areas while RS at least has some things.
