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Originally Posted by Prowler
It is quite surprising BDSP and even ORAS outsold HGSS. I always read Pokémon fans praising the HGSS games as being peak Pokémon. Personally, I think they're fine but not better than ORAS. Thing is, Johto lives off nostalgia pretty much. It's a flawed region with a rather underwhelming Pokédex. And the best Johto mons can only be obtained late in the game when you're in Kanto already... which makes zero sense. And Johto itself is not much of a full fledged region but more like Kanto extended.
People also say Kanto and Gen I live off nostalgia and that RBY have very flawed mechanics such as psychics being OP... and they're not wrong. But at least Gen I does not have the unbalanced level curve the Gen II games do.
ORAS are the perfect Pokémon remakes for me. They also have a huge Pokédex. Fun fact: ORAS are the reason we never got a Pokémon Z a decade ago or so. ORAS took the developers a long time to finish and quite frankly, it shows. So much content in that game.
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Both the Johto games and the anime kind of suffered from the "sophmore slump" where they relied too much on Kanto and didn't have their own identity. I like most of the Johto pokemon themselves though, but the games were fine, and the anime portion is known to get bogged down with a lot of repetitive filler eps for the first time, it's why people felt Ash's story was going nowhere at the time. Granted all the sagas later do have similar issues, but the writers manage to include more development for the cast and companions and better battles, even if the formula stayed the same.
Also the initial pokemon fad largely died down around 2001/early 2002, when we were in the middle of the Johto era. At least in the U.S., I don't know how it was in Europe.