Pokémon Generation 1 and 2. They story, gameplay, and mechanics are concise and not hand-hold-y, the designs are the ones I grew up with, they can easily be played on a phone emulator and have so many rom hacks that I never will totally experience everything they have to offer

Gen 2, Crystal. Was my favourite. I found the character selection and graphical upgrade was really nice. Gen 2 includes the previous game world. Collecting all the badges again was special.

But I played Gen 1, Blue the most. The missingno trick was a bunch of fun and it was my first gameboy game.

Edit: my friend said Soul Silver is peak and sun/moon is a close 2nd place.

I think two for me. In my opinion, it had the best animated sprites (later animated sprites were sometimes the entire sprite bouncing which felt lazy to me). I stopped playing after gen four though, so I’m definitely missing some.

Gen 4 or Gen 5. so much post-elite-4 content, and it’s not just “grind this arena endlessly” post-game content. Actual adventures in the case of the Gen 2 remakes and Gen 5.

Gen 3 holds a special place in my heart (Emerald was my first pokemon game) but the creature comforts of gameplay in 4 and 5 hold up a lot better

I enjoyed the gen4 remake for switch but it seriously lacked the amount of content in Platinum. They had a chance to greatly expand the distortion world and just… skipped it entirely instead.

Gotta be Black/White. It was the first time the writing really took a step forward. The antagonist wasn’t just evil for no reason. They had a compelling story and their motivations made sense and you could sympathize with them.

Gen 1 is the only gen. The rest are bullshit. Get off my lawn

Whichever generation was in the Pokémon game for the original Gameboy color. The one where there was a red, green, and yellow version of the same game.
That’s the only real relationship I have with pokemon, because it was such a great game. So great that I loved the game and played it on an emulator, as I didn’t have a Gameboy.

Gen two; the games were so damn good. Thank you Iwata

Gen 2 was best, because of that miltank that they nerfed in later versions.

specifically the pokemon, or the games ins aid generation.

gen 5 is imo objectively the best generation in terms of game content (virtually every game after black 2/white 2 has less content)

aa for pokemon designs, slight edge to gen 3, with 4 and 7 not particularly far behind.

The OG 150, with special shout out to the weed smoking cat from one of the newer gens.

I want to say 4 because that’s the one I started with but, realistically, gen 5 was the best. It had so many features:

• Animated sprites (they look better than the 3d models and I’ll never get over it)
• An actual story
• Used only the new pokemon for the regional dex
• Very cool abilities like Zoroarks

I haven’t played every generation but imo generation V (Pokemon Black/White) were the most interesting to me. It’s the sweet spot between the older clunkier games and the more modern ones.

Gen 1 had a lot of design issues: The special stat is overpowered, too many pokemon were poison type, move diversity was so poor that some types were just useless, and there were a lot of glitches.

Recent generations also have design issues: The story holds your hand every step of the way, characters are more detailed but less expressive, each generation has a gimmick that gets abandoned in the very next game, and there’s somehow a lot of glitches again!

Personally, my sweet spot is gen 4, but gens 3 and 5 are pretty solid too.

Five, because it was the only time the series innovated, and they got punished for it. Sequel games instead of re-releases of games I’ve already played, a brave story, and easily the series’ musical peak. It was the best Pokemon had ever looked, played and sounded.

We will never see it again.