>>55883515I like Gen 3's designs fine enough but people are absolutely delusional if they believe that Gen 3's design philosophy wasn't a bit different from 1 / 2. Even 2 had its differences with 1.
The GBA meant more color so they went a bit overboard on putting contrasting colors everywhere just to show that off even if it felt tacky.
Pretty much every generation has a shift of some kind and Gen 3 fans have bias considering they grew up with these creatures so they don't remember a time when they weren't a part of this franchise. Kids today don't see much of a difference between Gen 8 / 9 and 1 in terms of creature designs. As ridiculous as that may sound, think about how many of those who started from Gen 1 feel about 3 onwards.
tl;dr Every gen doesn't inherently have worse designs than others, they're just different
