>>58849538Nobody disliked the new Pokemon when it came out back then. And yes we called them "the new Pokemon". Not the new dex, not the new generation, not the new region, not the Johto Pokemon. They were the new Pokemon.
The very concept of having new Pokemon added to the original 151 was crazy. Most kids thought of Pokemon as the 151 that existed and that was it. There had never been new Pokemon added before, so most kids didn't even think of the idea. And yes I know some weird loser is going to go "urhm but you see Ho-oh in the first episode of the show" - it was the first episode, nobody who watched it knew who the 151 Pokemon were yet.
Gold and Silver felt revolutionary as games. Not just as Pokemon games. They were revolutionary games, period.
You could breed Pokemon together. I had never seen a game that let me do anything like that.
You could send your old Pokemon to the new game, and you could send them back later. Trading between games or save imports is still barely a thing today. GSC let you trade BACKWARD - it's still the only game in the series that can do that!
You could go back to the first game (and yes we called it "going back to the first game", not Kanto. Nobody knew what the fuck a Kanto was). I had never seen a game do that (it wasn't actually the first game to do it, but Ultima was for adults and Dragon Quest was niche in the west).
But the craziest thing at all was that time would pass, the game would know what hour and day it was and things would change in the game accordingly. This is mundane today because every Pokemon game does it and it's been adopted by other games like Animal Crossing. But in 2000, it was not mundane. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a bullshit rumor, like Mew under the truck or resurrecting Aeries in FF7. It wasn't just a cool feature. It was doing something that I didn't even know was possible. That was my actual reaction when I saw it. "I didn't know video games could do that."
