>>55399538the thing you have to understand about Pokemon's fall from grace with Gen 3 is that it had nothing to do with the quality of Gen 3 itself.
Youtubers tried to rationalize it for a while like
>ohh it had no moving sprites or day and night cycleNobody gave a single shit about that, most people didn't even play Crystal.
No, the reason Pokemon failed was because it wasn't cool enough for the X-treme 2000s, where everything had to be big and spiky and bulky, Pokemon's cutesy designs weren't gonna fly anymore.
Couple that with the fact that the early and mid 2000s saw an absolute explosion of monster capturing/battling franchises so you were spoiled for choice for cooler alternatives to Pokemon, why would you pick derpy ass Charizard when Yu-Gi-Oh was right there with Blue-Eyes White Dragon, the sickest monster you'd ever seen in your life?
You also had Beyblade and Medabots and shit like that, Mega Man got in on it with the Battle Network franchise which was also widely successful, if you wanted to be really contrarian you got into Zatchbell or Shaman King.
Pokemon was out and it only really got back in because literally all of these eventually just shat the bed or went out of style themselves while Pokemon kept on trucking.
