I think 4th gen has the best overall Pokemon designs, story line, toughest champion, and wide variations of maps and geography. It also gave us HeartGold and SoulSilver which are regarded as one of the best pokemon games ever.
BbDamian I'm a huge johto fan, I think that the region itself is really interesting in its historical roots!
koolness234 Gen 4 is so interesting (physical/special split!). I am actually one of the few still excited for the gen 4 remakes even with the designs (which I don't think are a big deal)
morebeastthanyou I think Gen 6 is the only time I played the card game
1 and 2 are just old so they arent as good naturally, esp with remakes
gen 3 is extremely solid overall, many including myself prefer RSE over the remakes, and FRLG are the best way to play kanto
gen 4 is so overrated. diamond and pearl are so slow with so many dex issues, granted platinum fixed a lot of the problems. HGSS are the most overrated pokemon games period. a lot of level gap issues with annoyingly low level wild battles so grinding is a pain, and pokemon following you is a pointless overrated feature.
gen 5 is then just also extremely solid. best story in the series, all of the games are very good (BW2 in particular) and actually keep you properly leveled the whole time.
gen 6 is underrated (XY that is). they are some of my personal favs in the series, but ORAS kinda drags it down
gen 7 is just boring and slow. theyre the only ones i never really replayed because it didnt interest me at all. nothing wrong with them, but nothing really stands out and z moves are lame
gen 8 is kinda gen 7 part 2. i didnt buy the DLC because i didnt care, so i got my 20 hours in and barely touched the game since.
I'm biased towards generation 1 because that's what I grew up with. I'm not sure what generation we're on now but I saw a Pokémon recently that was literally a pile of garbage or something... I think they're running out of ideas.
Gen 1 is so buggy and incredible unbalanced. Yellow is fun, I guess, but the games just have so many problems that they’re not worth it.
Gen 2 isn’t as bad. Playing the releases on the 3ds made me realize that there’s still problems but that it’s not as bad and genuinely more balanced.
Gen 3 is extremely solid. RSE are great games, and FRLG in their own right as well. This is a generation I probably play the most because of the access of emulators, but the hardest part is the lack of physical/special split, but there’s plenty of hacks that fix this.
Gen 4 is interesting because it did bring so much to the series with that generations Pokemon being great and the physical/special split, but DP are just a complete mess, platinum is better but not by a huge leap? I’m really excited for the remakes and hope they’ll fix some of the problems.
In regards to HG/SS, a lot of the problems that you mention are bad because of the attempted non-linearity. It’s a significant problem and those games are hardly playable. The rom hacks Storm Silver and its counterpart fix plenty of the problems for me and if those were canon, might be my favorites.
Gen 5 was solid from the jump, and only made better with BW2.
Gen 6 was sort of my reintroduction to the series and I LOVE XY, and think they’re really underrated. ORAS was fine, but not horrible.
Gen 7/8 are both pretty bad misses for me. They’re slow, too hand-holdy, and just not great. I’m hoping that the upcoming remakes are gonna be strong.
I didn’t play Let’s Go Eevee/Pilachu, but I’m not a fan of Pokemon Go and so I know I wouldn’t enjoy the things brought into the games here.
GrrrImABear seems like we hsve pretty similar opinions.
with gold/silver and HGSS, Tama Hero on youtube has a video talking about what you mentioned with linearity and other stuff in much more detail if you havent seen it already. i understand why but it is an issue for me
