3rd Gen What NOT to like about Gen 3

At first I didn't like a lot of the gen 3 Pokemon including the starters, but most of them grew on me after a while.

What I still resent gen 3 for though is the introduction of IV's & EV's. For me it took away a lot of the fun of Pokemon. It's just a tedious chore to get your Pokemon with the best stats, values, natures and egg moves. I avoided competitive battling until gen 6 because it was just too hard to get a competitively viable team without cheating until X & Y came out.

R / S / E will always be my favorite games, but my main gripe with them is the lack of selection in the beginning of the game. Really, besides your starter, Tailow, Slakoth, Shroomish, and the Pokemon in Granite Cave, there aren't much Pokemon to use that are half decent for quite awhile. This gets really annoying because you find yourself with a few overleveled Pokemon and a few underleveled Pokemon towards the end of the game. The sheer amount of good Pokemon that they crammed past the fourth gym is unreal. Also, Feebas is a pain to find and evolve in general. You can't even get the best berry for making Beauty Pokeblocks until after you beat the Elite 4.

I never had much problem with FRLG, to be honest. I was just always underleveled because you can easily skip routes in that game and I'm naturally lazy.

One of my favorite gens <3 My only annoyance was all of the trading I've had to do through my GameCube because of the new trading cable they made for SPs, while I could trade with my trading cable I had for my GBC with my standard GBA. So, it's restricted my ability to restart Colo/XD because I have to keep at least one save file completed to use the trading feature so I can trade between RSE and FRLG...

Though, I don't think that's directly related to Gen III. More of a gripe with the hardware and linking capabilities used in Gen III.

What not to like? Hoenn, I guess.

Thought of another thing, and although it's not restricted to Gen III, it's a HUGE issue that is most persistent with this generation.

Almost every copy of the gen III games you can find online are absolutely fake. That's not a problem with the games themselves, but it is a problem when people miss out on gen III and can't find an actual copy to play on, unless they're okay with playing on emulators. For collectors, it's especially bad.

I don't have very many issues with Gen III because overall it's pretty awesome. I think the major issue for R/S for me is that there STILL wasn't a physical/special split. This severely crippled some pokemon like Crawdaunt, who had two STABS that were special yet is a physical attacker. I feel like types being either physical or special would be acceptable, but yet moves that clearly should have been physical like ice punch had the "make contact" effect, and could receive poison from an effect spore shroomish or something. At that point it's hard to be understanding of the lack of a split. other than that I don't have any real problems with the games, except maybe for all of the surfing. It can get a little tiring haha. Oh and also minor things like the lack of differentiating between night and day, and also the whole dead internal battery thing. Normally that doesn't matter unless you need berries for a Milotic :(

As for FR/LG, same thing with the lack of physical/special split. And of course the whole lack of allowing friendship pokemon to evolve. I worked hard to raise a pesky little zubat to a golbat in a nuzlocke, with it only having growl and leech life or something... and then it "stopped evolving." Despicable. I wasn't a fan of needing to catch (or see? I can't remember) a certain number of pokemon to gain new items from the aides especially if playing a nuzlocke where you just can't.

(If that sounded really negative, just know that I love both sets of games :D)

Gen 3 is my favorite generation so I can't think of too much that I can't like about it.


The only thing that comes to mind is the fact that in Emerald there were unobtainable Pokemon. At the time I only had Sapphire and Emerald so I couldn't get Zangoose (Favorite Pokemon back then).

The removal of the day/night system! I really loved that add in gen II and to see it disappear in the next batch of games, not even to be reinstated for FR/LG was very disappointing. I guess it had something to do with the size of tje game in the cartridge or? Anyways, that's the thing I dislike most about Gen III.

The new system with berries was kind of annoying too, as I didn't play in contests much. Still, contests were pretty fun to have occasionally.

Me too the removal of Day\night system was a ruin of the game. Nintendo workers should atleast think about it. But it didn't give me any reason to complain. Well i mean i don't like the removal but its also not disturbing me.

Ever since the Physical/Special split of GenIV, it's a little hard to go back to GenIII games. It's a shame because I do love Hoenn as a region and Emerald is one of my favorite games in the series. XD

Introvert said:

What I still resent gen 3 for though is the introduction of IV's & EV's. For me it took away a lot of the fun of Pokemon. It's just a tedious chore to get your Pokemon with the best stats, values, natures and egg moves. I avoided competitive battling until gen 6 because it was just too hard to get a competitively viable team without cheating until X & Y came out.

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Actually, IVs were present in the first two generations, as well as Stat XP, a precursor to the EV system. What GenIII did was add natures and reformat IVs and change Stat XP into EVs so as to appeal to the competitive scene, which was starved for a deeper battle system at the time.

In GenI/GenII, your pokémon's IVs didn't matter as much because they only varied from 1-15 and you could max out your Stat XP in all stats instead of just two like EVs.

If you wanted proof that R/S/E barely had any major flaws, it's this thread. Nearly all flaws posted here are either nitpicky (feebas, guys? really? that's all you could think of?), easily negligible (water, which is no worse than caves - you know, like how many kanto and johto got, but hoenn barely did? the water was the replacement. and kanto and particularly johto STILL had a lot of water anyway) and something that plagues other games in the series. (physical/special split pre-gen 4, which i admit is dated but it's easy to adjust to anyway.)

The one thing I could agree on is Cerberus' post about the awful movepool for most Pokemon, but really this is a problem with a lot of Pokemon games anyway because there just way too many Pokemon that don't get any good moves until much higher levels anyway. B/W fixed that with reusable TMs...except for the fact you have to find the TM in the first place, and all the good moves are found later on, you might as have already gotten the moves you wanted by level up. And you need a guide, screw that.

And I honestly don't get the post game complaints. This is a complain I've seen thrown at EVERY Pokemon game anyway, so it's really overblown. And before you give me G/S/C, no. Kanto is small and terrible in that game. Emerald's Battle Frontier actually was fun because it encouraged players to widen their playstyle and actually develop their skills and be challenged, and if you were intimidated by that then it's really your fault and you shouldn't call the post game empty. Whereas Kanto was basically a run down of really weak trainers and Pokemon until you get to Red. Battle Frontier >>>>>>>>>>>> Gimped Kanto, any day. Platinum and Emerald have the best post game by far because of the battle frontier. B/W went back to Johto's idea of a "post-game" by adding cities that are just there. MORE cities does NOT equal to a better post game guys. To me a good post game is something that'll offer the player endless variety in its system and something to do to test your skills, something like the Battle Frontier. I don't know about B/W2 since I haven't beaten it, but if it had something like Battle Frontier then fantastic.

Red's Hawt Chibi Pelippers said:

The removal of the day/night system! I really loved that add in gen II and to see it disappear in the next batch of games, not even to be reinstated for FR/LG was very disappointing. I guess it had something to do with the size of tje game in the cartridge or? Anyways, that's the thing I dislike most about Gen III.

Click to expand...

Thank god it was gone actually. This feature adds NOTHING but limits, and for what? Realism? Applying realism to game design is a bad, bad idea and should never happen (unless it was designed around realism, which Pokemon isn't)

Look at it this way. Why should I wait until evening to catch me a Murkrow? Why stop progressing and wait until then? And then, why should I sleep and wake up next morning to trigger this event that could help me out? It's terrible. R/S/E had mostly everything any time you want and that's great. The day/night system is just limits for no justified reason. And then gen 4 took it to the extreme. This is one of my least favorite thing about Pokemon by far and one of the main flaws in its design, and one of the biggest reasons why Emerald is the only Pokemon I can replay. And before telling me that I can change the settings - why should I do that to begin with?

I enjoyed Pokemon Ruby but it was something about the story i didn't like. Pokemon Ruby was just one of those games that i really didn't enjoy, maybe it just me that really had a hard time falling for this game but reading alot online, people dislike this games because you weren't allowed to trade over pokemon from the previous gen and having the games where you can't get all pokemon made PKGamers mad. That's why they recreated Pokemon Firered & LeafGreen.

There really isn't much wrong with the generation 3 games, but I do have a couple points.

- Apart from Emerald, no Gen 3 games have animated pokémon sprites. Considering Crystal was on a much weaker system yet had animation (Which actually looks better than the animation from Emerald or any Gen 4 games) so this oversight was quite annoying when I really R/S/FR/LG

- The amount of surfing near the end of R/S/E. The game just becomes rather repetitious and just throws lots of boring sea routes at you. The last good 10-15% of the game feels rather rushed as a whole.

Well, Gen III was my favorite, so I can't think of anything that I really dislike about it...

I will say, though, the lack of Johto Pokemon was something that really saddened me as a kid. In my Leaf Green version, I had the whole Kanto and Hoenn parts of the Pokedex filled up... But my Johto dex was sadly empty, because there was a lot of stuff that was either unavailable, or way too difficult to get. Because of this, I always grew up viewing Johto as a strange, exotic region that I never really quite understood... I tried playing Crystal as a kid, and I managed to beat the game and get to Red (didn't beat him, though), but the leap in graphics was just so severe that I couldn't really get into the game the way I could with Gen III, you know? So, yeah, I just wish that Johto Pokemon weren't so mysterious... That was something that really hampered my experience as a kid.

3rd Gen was the best. I started with Gold & Silver, with Gold in German (note: I was 6 years old, had trouble reading English as it's not my native language and German isn't my native language either), and even though I had hard times with both games, I loved them. So when I was 10 and I figured out what English was and knew how to play Pokémon, within no-time I had 300 hours played on my Emerald Rom. (The only game that ever might win that amount of playtime would be Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, but that's off-topic :p)
The only things I plainly hated, and still infuriates me, is that if you now have FireRed, LeafGreen, Ruby, Emerald AND Sapphire, find the patience to trade the roamers and starters in FR/LG, you still cannot legally catch Mew, Ho-oh, Lugia, Celebi, Deoxys, Jirachi etc. because the events are no longer accessible. The idea of those special events just made me cry when I found out, after 300 hours of roaming still not being able to have all Pokémon. Nevertheless, 3rd Gen is brilliant :p

Pokemon contests were meh

I liked them initially, but there's really no reason to pursue it. The rewards aren't satisfying enough.

Not many pokemon in the hoen pokedex and the lack of a story which is problem with all the pokemon games haha. Lastly I did not like the implementation of the berry could have been handled better

i like everything about gen 3, the only thing that made me upset was that i could not transfer my pokemon from gen 2 into gen 3, i got so upset when i had to leave my favorite pokemon umbreon in my pokemon silver :(

3 water HMs. Way too many. I loved everything else except the bright tiles.