@ArdainianRight @Terry @William_The_Dragonborn for most people, it'll be the first one they played.
i like gen 3 because it is the first one i played and it also includes a lot of the 1st and 2nd gen pokemon so i didn't feel like i was missing out on that. it was the last purely 2d gen too, and that pixel art is peak. the music is awesome, the post-game content is fun.
there was also this thing called the secret base. you could customize your base with furniture and plushies and stuff, and you could create it in specific locations across the whole world. then you could save your character data in there with your current party with a little catchphrase. the awesome part was that when you linked with someone, your secret base would appear in their world so they could battle you. not only that, but EVERYONE that you ever linked with would be transferred over too, so there was this chain of secret bases of tons of people that you just had no clue who they were. it was really fucking cool.
The thing is Gen 1 landed on a really clever gameplay loop within the context of extremely limited hardware, and they've never really iterated on that in a compelling way, beyond QOL, balancing, and side content. Gens 8 and 9 try to iterate, but they just do worse versions of what modern JRPGs do, whereas original Pokemon was a clever twist on old-school JRPGs. It doesn't really optimize the advantages of modern conventions, it just slaps them on to try to make the games feel less dated.
@ArdainianRight @Terry @William_The_Dragonborn you can do that for a certain amount of time, just duplicating the same thing with better graphics and a few new mechanics and such. gen 3 added a shit ton of stuff to the game and had a pretty large jump in graphics that felt meaningful. after that, i kind of feel like everything started slowly going downhill. gen 4 was still decent, and i like whatever one alola was just because of the theming and the fuckin funny pokemon designs, but that's about it.
i also liked pokemon mystery dungeon, thought that was kinda fun.
