>>45541726Because Gen 3 as a whole was a total mess. It also coincided with the end of the Pokémania, but it you think about it, Gen 3 had a lot of the blame.
Main games:
- Ruby and Sapphire were underwhelming as fuck. Not only it managed to look worse than Gen 2 (yeah, technically is better, more colors and that, but art direction was all over the place), but you couldn't transfer your Pokémon onto the next generation, you couldn't go to another region after beating the league, you lost day/night cycle and a lot of little details Gen 2 had.
- It starts with the nu-Pokémon designs, a complete shift from the first 2 generations.
- Retarded evil teams that start the trend of "Ancient Pokémon demi-god that can erase all life on earth if it falls in the wrong hands". And we got 2 of them in one gen.
- Shittiest music and world design
Anime:
- Ash starts to get boring, having him for the 3rd region in a row instead of rebooting with another protag or something.
- They get rid of Misty but keep Brock
Trading Cards:
- Wizards of the Coast leaves the TCG and it starts being run by The Pokémon Company.
- Power Creep galore, your old cards are now shit
- Weird shit like Delta Especies and all that
Manga:
- WTF Emerald
Literally, the only thing that gets better in Gen 3 are spinoffs, which are remembered better than they were due to how underwhelming the "real" games were.
While Gen 4 continued with much of these things, it admitelly looked way better, had better music, had interesting gimmicks (Pokéwalker), had online play (and made trading at "catching them all" much easier), and it resulted in Platinum and the Gen 2 remakes, which are considered the peak of the series alongside Gen 5.
So of course Gen 4 made a lot of people return to play Pokémon.
