Ever realized an old gen game wasn't as good as you originally thought?

Has anyone ever played that really good old gen Pokémon game and loved it, only to try it again later on and realize it wasn't as good as you originally thought? What was that game for you?

In my case, it was DPPt. When first playing on release I thought it was absolutely amazing - cool sprites, great music, awesome new Pokémon designs, and just super fun overall. Then I went back to it later and it didn't seem as good as I remembered. I realized out of all the generations released so far it had, to me, the most meh Pokémon designs introduced and the battle/UI animations were super slow. I also didn't like the region layout much at all, it was more boring to explore now than before. Sorry Sinnoh. :(

RBY. I loved them when I've played them for the first time, but I can't get back to them now. The amount of bugs, type advantages not working properly, some weird mechanics like Wrap or Bind (not sure which one now) completely stops you from attacking, the small number of moves of some types and the fact that better versions exists made these games unplayable for me.

Janp said:

RBY. I loved them when I've played them for the first time, but I can't get back to them now. The amount of bugs, type advantages not working properly, some weird mechanics like Wrap or Bind (not sure which one now) completely stops you from attacking, the small number of moves of some types and the fact that better versions exists made these games unplayable for me.

Click to expand...

I imagine this is quite a common sentiment. Personally, as someone who started in Gen III, my sole intent in the VC releases is to take advantage of all of the glitches. I'm thinking Dragonite with Agility + Hyper Beam, Cloyster's Clamp, something with Wrap / Bind (afaik its both), Alakazam...

Not really.

But then again, I think I see games in a different light. Older games have their charms that newer games don't really have and I appreciate them for that, it's just a question of different games for different things.

Newer games are better from a QoL perspective, older games are better if you want to do a challenge run quickly (which is the kind of thing I enjoy doing) or do some kind of game modification.

I think I had this experience with Black/White and even wrote some relatively long-ass post on here after I re-played it for the first time

I experienced this with BDSP about halfway through.

It seemed cute and I liked the art style. About halfway through the wild encounters felt awfully repetitive and the friendship bonuses kept occurring non-stop with slow text. I'd rather just play Platinum instead.

Soul Silver definitely falls under that category. But that is mostly due to gen 4 lag. Since the games worked out their technical flaws over the last couple generations it's hard to go back to gen 4 in particular with everything being so sluggish. I played Platinum last year for the first time and I really hated the experience. :(

I know i'm a big gen 6/7 fan (and still am) but when I replayed X a year ago, I found no motivation to go into this cave I don't remember the name of...lol. When I replayed UM a few months ago, when I got to the last island (once again forgot the name of it) I had the nerve to ask myself "Am I even having fun anymore?" But I managed to get through to the end eventually.

I do plan to replay the original gen 2 once not so lazy (I have Crystal and Silver digitally and Gold physically so I don't know what one to return to yet).

Pretty much anything pre-3DS due to the newer games' QoL improvements.
I've replayed all the 3DS Pokemon titles at least once. DS and older games I just don't really replay because I can't be bothered to deal with the older mechanics.

Old generation games that were good to me in the past are still good to me now. I never really cared too much for graphics or animations. The main thing that I love about the older games is that all Pokémon that existed during those times exist in the games, unlike the games on the Switch. My only issue when revisiting an old generation game however is getting used to the old game mechanics after playing Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond for a while, such as the lack of each individual move being categorized as special and physical in generations 1-3, HM moves in all generations, and the lack of the ability to access your Pokémon boxes from anywhere instead of having to use a PokéCenter PC prior to generation 8 in the main core games. Once I get used to the old game mechanics and decide my HM slave, I am good to go and can enjoy some nostalgic gaming!

Absolutely. My favourite games are Gold/Silver/Crystal, and I can't deny they have flaws.
Worse still though, are Red/Blue/Yellow. And it makes sense, of course - they were the first games! They set the standard of the "formula", and introduced the world to Pokémon. For their time, they were incredible - they just haven't aged well.

I remember playing Yellow thoroughly when the Virtual Console versions released. By that point, I had gotten used to competitive battling, I knew that certain types were exclusively Physical and others were Special - I knew that Special was a single stat - and other things that went on "under the hood" in the Gen 1 games.
Overall, Gen 1 is a tremendously slow experience, even with move animations switched off. Whatever complaints we can have about newer games, we can at least celebrate the nice pacing of battles now!

I used to absolutely love Platinum when i was a kid, but upon giving it a spin recently, it just kind of doesn't hit the same? I mean, i do like it but just not as much as before.

Currently playing crystal and the Kanto region lacks a lot.it feels barren.lacks side quests and NPCs who phone you.no safari zone.veridian forest looks incomplete.the wild pokemon in bushes seem to have their levels all over the place making it difficult to scale and the bushes seem lacking.its like they got 70% through creating the game and then just sold it as is.

I never play the first two gens anymore. With the remakes and ROM hacks is there really a reason?

Og RBY and GSC have aged pretty badly and RSE i think is kinda boring. But honestly every generation has at least one gripe for me personally

Red and Blue were good for their time, and I enjoyed playing them the first time around. Nowadays, I can only really recommend FireRed and LeafGreen for someone who wants to play a Kanto game.

I've also increasingly felt that Sun and Moon (and, by extension, Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon) are a slog each time I tried replaying them.

Sheep said:

Has anyone ever played that really good old gen Pokémon game and loved it, only to try it again later on and realize it wasn't as good as you originally thought? What was that game for you?

In my case, it was DPPt. When first playing on release I thought it was absolutely amazing - cool sprites, great music, awesome new Pokémon designs, and just super fun overall. Then I went back to it later and it didn't seem as good as I remembered. I realized out of all the generations released so far it had, to me, the most meh Pokémon designs introduced and the battle/UI animations were super slow. I also didn't like the region layout much at all, it was more boring to explore now than before. Sorry Sinnoh. :(

Click to expand...

The first experience will always be better, I find. I don't think that it's necessarily DPPt that's not as good as you remember, it's that its replayability isn't good enough to you.

That can easily happen with every old gen, because we were simply fine with less.

We were fine with awful Pokémon variety and repetition, with lots of routes and trainers using the same Pokémon over and over again. We were fine with many Pokémon that are actually viable and interesting to battle with nowadays being just Dex fillers back then, due to the lack of Abilities, garbage movepools, or other game mechanics and updates from later gens that made them usable over time. We were fine with huge balance issues such as certain types lacking good moves, etc.

So, despite how the more modern games are usually more heavily criticized, it's undeniable that after experiencing the improvements made in certain areas, the many QoL and gameplay updates, it can be really hard to go back to games that lack those things... even impossible for some people to return to certain games. I personally can't even touch Gen 1-3 games with a stick at this point... unless it's with a rom hack that adds features from later gens into it, while improving Pokémon variety and other aspects like Polished Crystal or Radical Red do.

I think this is an inevitable feeling due to hardware limitations of the time and the fact that you can only experience something for the first time once. For all their various flaws, the modern titles are far smoother experiences than the older ones, with quality-of-life additions that make them much more bearable to play on subsequent run-throughs. The noticeable gap between hardware performance is getting smaller and smaller as time goes by unless you're into that sort of thing (think Digital Foundry, who over-analyse every technical aspect of every game to the point that it's hard to know what they're talking about unless you already know) so the effect is less on modern titles - which makes it greater by extension on older ones.

This can work the other way where nostalgia overrides these feelings and you're disatisfied with a particular game, but on the whole I think this is the reason for that kind of feeling. It doesn't feel as good because you've already played it once before and know what to expect, and you're playing games that run on better hardware so going back to older titles without the modern comforts you take for granted can be very painful. This is why remakes do so well most of the time.