>>45237652Pokemon was literally never good. Not by any objective measure.
Red and Blue are buggy, horribly balanced pieces of shit held together with duct tape and a prayer, and Gold/Silver layed the groundwork for the gimmicky Fuckening that was to come. From Ruby/Sapphire onward, the series and its fans dug themselves into a hole from which no video game objectivity can escape.
Pokemon is so bad as a video game, that Pokemon fans have to come up with their own rubric for what constitutes a *good* Pokemon game. A rubric that bears absolutely no relationship to actual things that make actual games good. For example, it does not now, nor has it ever mattered how many monsters are actually in the game.
We play Pokemon, not because they're good, but because we played them as kids and they're so fundamentally unchanged from what they were in 1996 that playing the new ones, as bad as they are, still gives us a glimmer of what that was like. That's it.