2nd Gen Obtaining the brand new Pokemon

GSC are top notch games but one nitpick I have with it is how they implemented the new Pokemon. 100 new Pokemon were introduced to the Pokemon world when Gold and Silver were released. This was the first time new Pokemon were added after the original 151, and for some reason a lot of them were rare or hard to obtain.

I mean when you have new Pokemon, they should be more prominent I think than they actually were in the games where they were sidelined into dark caves with 1% encounter rates or swarm or Kanto or through link trades that required trade items or even breeding. The only Johto Pokemon that would probably be encountered by most players is Sentret, maybe Hoothoot, Mareep, Hoppip, and a few others. Pokemon like Marill appeared only in Mt. Mortar with a 1% encounter rate and Larvitar, Murkrow and Houndour were only obtainable post E4 in Kanto. I didn't even know Sneasel was obtainable only in Kanto in GS originally. Crystal fixed the problem a little bit like placing Phanpy on Route 46 early on or Teddiursa in the Dark Cave on Route 31 early too. But they were still pretty rare.

How do you feel about how they implemented the new Pokemon in the game? And how would you do things differently if you had the chance?

I wish the games would have implemented a little more diversity in terms of Pokemon choices throughout the routes. With only 100 new Pokemon added in GS with the inclusion of Legendaries, there's already a squeeze when it comes to obtaining unfamiliar Pokemon. When you're playing a region based game you want to at least encounter Pokemon from that region. It sucks when you keep finding pidgey and rattata on the same routes in a game where you can also find hoothoot and sentret.

So yeah, I agree with you, I think Gold and Silver could have made it a bit easier. There's a bunch of caves where you could have put a Pokemon like Larvitar in and even Ice path for Sneasel.

You make a good point. Crystal was my first game, so all the Pokémon were new to me. But now, when I'm playing through it once again, the Pokémon I really want from Gen2 are hard to come by.

I found many of the things pertaining to the Generation II Pokémon to be quite stupid, namely that many of the widely-publicized entries were either only encountered less than 0.01% of the time outside of swarms, that some of the really good ones were only available in Kanto, and many of the newly-introduced Pokémon seemed slower than what was generally available from Generation I.

I was definitely annoyed at how many of the 2nd Gen Pokemon were either crippled with bad stats or were near-unobtainable outside of swarms or postgame-only areas. Having the 7th Gen Pokemon be so rare in S/M just gave me so many bad flashbacks of this.

I may be in the minority but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Like, these Pokemon were THE coolest so they were harder to find. Made them feel like they're worth a little more even though they're weak and otherwise useless (looking at you Yanma). Kanto Pokemon were common because they were standard and boring... Johto Pokemon? You truly had to work to be a master.

Coming across the new Pokemon was always exciting. I wished that a lot of them were more easily obtainable. The rarity of some meant that at first I didn't even know that they were on the Johto dex, like Larvitar and Skarmory.