>>54649687As someone who literally in the last week just replayed pokemon yellow and am close to finishing post game on crystal, I can say with certainty gen 2 isn't the best gen ever, but its not a terrible gen. It's definitely better than original gen 1.
Going into them, I had already remembered they didn't have hardly any of the new QoL things the nugen games have, and while that detracts from the experience somewhat nowadays, that's kind of a non-issue since obviously the games have become much more streamlined than they used to be, which is to be expected. What did hit me hard was how ridiculous it was at points to level. For example, in yellow at the very least I had to power level random encounters for an hour at 10x speed two separate times. Once at Koga, and another right before the elite 4. Throughout most of the game, even afterwards I was still roughly 10 levels below the gyms, and I ended the game close to 5-6 levels at my highest from blue. I beat every trainer I could find, but mostly avoided random encounter battles until I ended up having to grind them for several hours (at 10x game speed I reiterate) because I needed the EXP
Now that i've almost completed crystal, I'm already in post game, and at most I only had to power level for maybe 20 minutes total (at 10x speed) across the whole main game, and I ended roughly even with lance. I imagine i'm going to need to power level for a decent bit longer to fight red, but that remains to be seen and I can't comment on post game grinding yet
TLDR Gen 1 has a shittier level curve than gen 2 but neither game is the best in the series by far
