>>49908001I started in GSC (Silver, to be precise) and started seeing the Pokemania fade well before Gen 3. In my experience the lack of transferability hit the dedicated fans hardest, not the normies. The dedicated fans actually cared about catching them all, not the people who simply rode the craze. Even though I didn't hate the Hoenn or Sinnoh games, it really, really upset me that completing the Dex suddenly became unusually difficult. Since you couldn't transfer Pokemon from Gen 2 to Gen 3, most Kanto and Johto Pokemon became unusually difficult to obtain unless you had FRLG and Colosseum/XD. The fact that I had cloned so many Pokemon using the GSC cloning glitch and planned to transfer them over and use as trade fodder made it feel even worse.
Even if you did somehow manage to complete the Dex (including Ho-Oh and Lugia, which could only he obtained in XD and Colosseum), you still had a limit of transferring only six Pokemon per day via PalPark. This arbitrary restriction wouldn't be lifted until HGSS. I was honestly lucky that I had a DS Lite. People who had a DSi wouldn't even be able to transfer at all. You could try completing the Dex as much as possible in the Gen 4 games, but so many Pokemon being locked behind gimmicks like Pokeradar, Honey Trees, and daily swarms made it very difficult, and that's not even including the fact that these games also had GBA toggle-exclusive Pokemon (sucks for people with a DSi). In hindsight, I feel like they should've included all 382 Pokemon (all Pokemon except Mew, Celebi, Jirachi, and Deoxys) in base RS to ease the transition and lifted the arbitrary restriction on Pal Parking Pokemon in DP. People may claim that they miss when certain Pokemon were unusually rare, but I'm honestly glad that games since BW2 have all had large regional dexes. I glad that the younger generations don't have to suffer the same way when completing the Dex.
