2nd Gen Could Gen 2 have the best games?

[illumine]

Gen 2 is awesome due to the large amounts of additions and improvements they made compared with Gen 1 (Pokegear, Berries, Held Items etc.). It's also a very good sequel to Gen 1 too.

Admittedly the implementation of berries was probably better than in Gen. III, where berries and their categorisation were basically the plot-line. Still, though, you figure that most people's liking of Gen. II was more on account of the overall game than other gens, and factors relating to it - its journey, locations, atmosphere, etc. - rather than particular facets, which is somewhat nice. In addition, it seems strange to like Gen. II because Gen. I was apparently worse, surely approximating its quality would be an independent action. It seems to be looking at Gen. II more as a question of progress to somewhere else than a separate group of games.

Can't forget crystal which added in moving sprites which was crazy for the time.

To be fair, whatever they 'added' to Crystal, they could not keep it going for the length of a second gen game, it exhausted itself by the time it reached Kanto and such, as mostly its gimmick was making a lot of noise in the Johto region and ignoring the rest. It was a somewhat weird decision, but realistically Crystal was mostly about early changes, not about creating a sustained game which was good.

And narratively, the rival was indeed a trivial addition in R/S/E. Brendan/May was a clear sign that Pokémon had taken a decidedly childish turn. This oddly cheerful and sappy character could hardly be a rival (which was unfortunately transmitted to ORAS too).

To be fair, at least they didn't go as far as D/P, where the 'rival' was not only not supposed to be an opposed character, but the game spent the first sequence trying to act as PR for them. Still, though, it's true that the addition of a 'friendly' rival who nonetheless was supposed to keep many of the 'negative' traits of the early ones, such as being introduced as someone arbitrarily ahead of you, etc., was slightly bizarre and very poorly implemented, and they inadvertently come off quite badly for this although the game seemingly does not want to say so. Realistically the 'friendly rival' archetype just seems like a means of smuggling in rival traits while assuming that the player should then be happy with these and accept a subordinate place.

Yeah, though, the contrast between May's introduction and that of G/S's rival is highly pronounced. Not to mention how she seems to turn into the borg when talked to in the lab. The game had really given up on certain things by then, and you sort of wonder if players' demands that each game be more glamorous than the last wouldn't slow down the series but also leave no time for considering what was good in previous gens, reconsidering certain directions, or so on without just ending the series. You sort of wonder past a point if they want self-sufficient games as well.

If we could have 2 regions back then, why can't we have 2 or even 3+ now?
Anyway, Jhoto is one of my favorite regions.

So it sounds like you like 'Johto'?

To be fair, the recent regions seem more like dartboards for throwing things at than independent regions - compare the beginning of D/P, for instance, you're in a plot-line or tutorial, but not a region - with their own pathos, as it were, so putting them together might be a bit too much of crowding between them. The early games had a darker, less shiny aesthetic, so that the blacked-out, quiet Kanto worked somewhat as an addition.

That said, it does seem clear that G/S had significant advantages over future games, and the view which holds these empty because a Zigzagoon at the beginning of the game looks better (than a Sentret, for instance, but it doesn't. A sculpture needn't be better than a painting), doesn't seem like it would be intending to play through most of it regardless. Anyway you figure that the series shouldn't touch Johto in a main game until and unless it sorts things out a fair bit, as at present it would not be capable of creating such an atmosphere anew. In any case we can be certain that the Pokémon of Mt. Silver may never again seem remote.