[shirogane86x]

To be honest, not most of them. It took until GBA era to get some decent mainline games, and the series probably peaked around DS era, both mainline and spin offs. Gen 1 and 2 have so many flaws that make them age really badly

[duped]

It used to be commonly held that Gen III was the worst of all the games with the Gen IV remakes of Gen II as the peak. Has that opinion shifted?

[shirogane86x]

To be honest I think the opinion was always generally divided. In my personal experience in the community, gen III and IV seemed to be the most popular, with significant but smaller sections of the community enjoying Gen I, V and II. I haven't met many people whose favourite is post Gen V though. (Mine is Gen IV, closely followed by Gen III and V)

[bradjohnson]

What flaws? Age really badly in what sense?

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

Technical flaws: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_glitches_(Ge...

(Something a lot of people don't know is that Mew's data actually exists in the generation 1 games and that it's technically possible to have it in the game on original hardware, sprite and all. The technical means by which one can obtain it is actually the same as the means by which one encounters the famous Missingno. I've personally done it in an emulator.)

I also see some gameplay flaws but they're mostly opinion (I'm not who you replied to, FWIW):

- Gen 1 had a single "Special" stat which was used as both Defense and Attack; this was split in Gen 2 to be Special Defense and Special Attack. This actually makes it a little fun to go back and play those games because some mons are just broken, e.g., Chansey so maybe it's not a great example. I believe this was a consequence of the memory size of the game flash cards being too small to support more numbers.

- Competitive teams from Gen 1 are determined by the 3 mons (of 6) which aren't on every single competitive team for the generation[1]. Normal is generally considered to be the best defensive type in the game for two reasons: 1) its only natural weakness is fighting, which doesn't have any good offensive moves in Gen 1, and 2) it's immune to the paralyze chance from the move Body Slam because Body Slam is a Normal-type move. The 3 mons which don't change per team are all single-type Normal.

I'm not exactly sure about the gen 2 games but I don't generally find myself drawn back to them. But I also don't find myself drawn to gen 3, for example. I do love myself a good gen 3 hack, though.

0: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Same-type_attack_bon...

1: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/rby-ou-sample-teams.36...

[bradjohnson]

Gold and silver also had celebi hidden in the game files and it could be hacked in with a gameshark!

TBH, I don't consider the glitch list that you shared to be a list of flaws. I played the original pokemon games a lot, and heard all of the rumours about the game. Very rarely if ever did I encounter a glitch without seeking it out. Honestly the existence of missingno and the rare candy duplication glitch were enhancements to the experience when I had already played the game exhaustively.

> This actually makes it a little fun to go back and play those games because some mons are just broken

I agree! I really don't consider lack of competitive balance to be a significant flaw for the first games, since the game design was based around the single player experience. If all of the pokemon were balanced, I would consider it a detriment to the game. Half of the joy of finding new pokemon and discovering evolutions was to find these imbalances and use them to destroy the elite four, or show off to your friends.

As far as flaws, I was mostly asking from a game design or implementation perspective, because hard to replicate glitches that reveal hidden secrets and 150 monsters to uncover with some being ultra powerful was literally exactly what I wanted as a kid. It's also good game design, even if not 100% of it was intentional.

[shirogane86x]

- the games were very buggy

- gen 1 pokemon are very basic and probably some of the worst in the series (subjective)

- the games are extremely unbalanced, and many types have only one evolution line while others have a lot, there's no uniformity (gen 1 has only 1 dragon and 1 ghost line)

- the lack of physical special split hits many types insanely hard and they never balanced for it (i.e.: Ghastly line is a special attacker but is the only ghost type, ghost type is physical for some reason)

- gen2 is basically non linear for most of Johto, which completely destroys the levels on the gym leaders and the wild pokemon. The Kanto section has similar issues. And red is only difficult because it's insanely overlevelled compared to everything else

- gen 2 gym leaders don't have Johto pokemon (lol)

- trainer AI, especially in some instances, is very weirdly programmed (Blaine for example uses healing items on full HP pokemon for no reason)

- lack of moves means even late game, trainers have start-of-game moves ( blue has a rhydon with tail whip and leer, but no ground or rock moves. And an Exeggutor with no grass or psychic damaging moves. And he's the final boss)