>>44259615This moment was great because the whole game signified how much Kanto had changed in two years.
The reason why Kanto pandering is stale and falls flat nowadays is because GF doesn't understand that normies don't have nostalgia for Kanto itself, they have nostalgia for all of the Indigo regions and how they actually felt like a living, breathing, world instead of some monotonous video game place that has random continents and monsters pop up every few years.
It's been 20 years since then and GameFreak still hasn't made Kanto with the dark types added in GSC, the day and night cycle, in-region breeding, or acknowledging any of the later evolutions that were introduced.
Similarly, HGSS is great because it does exactly that, it modernizes GSC to be more in line with the games at the time. To a lesser extent, ORAS does this as well by letting you catch anything you want before the E4. Yet Kanto is still stuck in the same, bland, tired formula.
It's upsetting that they will never get this. According to my normie friends the regional variants are nothing more than symbolic of how they've completely run dry of ideas nowadays; they're entirely unaware that Alola forms only being Kanto Pokemon were meant to target them specifically because they're not nostalgic for anything other than the "original 151 + Togepi" exactly how they were back then. To them, it looks like they're not even banking on nostalgia, they're just out of designs.
