>>47451771Everyone where I lived who actually played the games and wasn't exclusively sticking to Anime/TCG loved GS because they were actually revolutionary for their time. All that marketing hype ever since the anime's first episode finally paid off and we had the game with "Pikablu", Togepi, Snubbull, that mystifying golden bird bastard we soon came to know as Ho-oh as well as Lugia. The games felt more alive than ever before thanks to the addition of color, patched up mechanics and bugfixes (even if we did lament the loss of MissingNo and desperately tried to find its successor), new Pokemon, new types and all the SOUL they poured into what might have been Pokemon's final pair of games.
By the time Crystal came here, everyone had their fill and experienced enough hype overload from revisiting the first game's region two years later and finally getting a team powerful enough to take down Red, we were burnt out from how long Pokemon as a franchise was going. Anime felt wrong even before they got rid of the GS Ball, the constant movies made them feel less magical over time, and Crystal didn't really help reignite the game-side hype since it barely changed enough from the perspective of kids to feel like a worthy buy, unlike Yellow before it. The animated sprites and other little things were cool, but it didn't feel as important as having a Pikachu buddy like the anime and being able to get all three starters in a single game without trading, exploiting glitches or using Stadium. If you told me we got cheated out of the online communications that Japan had, I would've been pissed off, too.
After that, we all basically moved on before we knew RS existed. Some of us were "eh", some of us gave it a spin and liked it, but we all knew it wouldn't ever be the same.
