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SUPER POLL: What is your FAVOURITE main series Pokémon game (or games) of all time?

Which is the best main series game/s in your opinion?

  • RGB

  • Yellow

  • Gold/ Silver

  • Crystal

  • Ruby/ Sapphire

  • FR/LG

  • Emerald

  • Diamond/ Pearl

  • Platinum

  • HeartGold/ SoulSilver

  • Black/ White

  • BW2

  • XY

  • ORAS

  • Sun/ Moon

  • Ultra Sun/ Ultra Moon


Results are only viewable after voting.
I want to highlight the importance of Crystal, which introduced so many core features like:
- playing as a female character
- moving Pokemon sprites
- the first ever online service
- the first ever Battle Tower

And other stuff as well. No other third version has introduced similarly core features.
 
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My top 5 list is the following
5. HGSS
I don't deny this was a great remake. However, I played the original GSC way too many times to be excited about it. The best part of HGSS was the Rocket Executives and Red. Also, I like how they include Pokethalon and the safari zone for extra things to do.

4. BW
Best story ever. Lacking in content, however. Still, I love a good story, and it was amazingly engaging. The Plasma crisis is probably the best villain crisis story ever.

3. ORAS
The story follows more or less RSE so there's not much to talk about. However, I love the enhanced details given to the vibrant Hoenn region. I love that they included underwater battles with other trainers, and I enjoyed the return of the Dive feature explore the deep sea. The Dex Navi was fun and useful searching for pokemon with egg moves and hidden abilities (bonus points if they are holding an item). Also, I love how they brought back Steven Stone with style :D

2. Platinum
Distortion World, Giratina, Battle Frontier, the Stat Trainers... what's not to love? ROUTE 217 that is. Aside from that (and the slow game play) I thoroughly enjoyed Platinum. Also, fourth generation has a lot of my favorite pokemon, and it was in Platinum that they were available during the main campaign.

1. B2W2
Great story by pokemon standards, and an awesome amount of content to enjoy. Even after you're done with the main campaign, there's just so much to do - from rebattles to dating, there's a ton of stuff available for entertainment. Also, you can adjust the battle difficulty to your liking.
 
Ugh, it's hard. I guess in terms of entertainment value alone, I'd pick White 2. There's so much plot in that game, plus the post-E4 material is extensive and fun. I still replay that game even six years later. :p
 
Oh, this was tough for me. The truth is I haven't beaten a lot of Pokemon games. But the ones I have I've played through at least twice.

You see when it comes with the basics of Pokemon games, it's actually really hard for me to choose. But if I go by the experiences while I had playing the game the first time, I find it a little easier to find the greats.

ORAS is my tippy top favorite. The gameplay was super great, the region was absolutely huge and great to explore. A lot of fun after story things to do. But of course, what topped it for me was buying the game with my two friends, day 1, and going to my friends place to play it. Then while we were in school we would always battle each other, using our copies of the game. Heck, he and I even wrote the script for a comic based off of our trainers adventures in the game with their Pokemon. That just puts this game to the top for me.

Crystal is a second favorite. It's a classic game, but everytime I play it, it still feels so fresh and new, and fun to play. Te story is simple, but a great one, and I loved the mystery with Suicune. Of course, it has a lot of nostalgia too, because it was my frist Pokemon game I ever played really.

Sun and Moon as a third, for a lot of reasons. The pre-game hype, was so freaking real. I had so much fun analyzing the trailers and finding the little things and discussing with others what was going to be going down in the games. I formed a lot of expectations, and the game hit on quite a few of them. On top of that it was freaking gorgeous, and a lot of the Pokemon ere great additions to the dex.
 
Black and White. I'll fight all of you. Best story of all the games in my opinion, nice pokémon design, good protagonist design (Hilda in particular), well-written characters (Cheren, Bianca, Ghetsis, N, just to name a few). They actually made you care and put meaning behind you getting the version mascot, as well.
 
Black and White. I'll fight all of you. Best story of all the games in my opinion, nice pokémon design, good protagonist design (Hilda in particular), well-written characters (Cheren, Bianca, Ghetsis, N, just to name a few). They actually made you care and put meaning behind you getting the version mascot, as well.

You select the battlefield. I select ham-to-ham combat for the weaponry. Unless you're not hammy enough to take me on!
 
^ BW1 is a great game (possibly the best among initial pairs of a generation), but when compared to Emerald, Platinum, HGSS, and especially to BW2, it falls short in all aspects, except for the plot and the MCs.

That said, if one values a good plot, well written characters, and well designed MCs, BW1 is the best, imo.

So it depends of what each player values the most.
 
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Sorry for double posting...

I find it interesting to see how the rankings change from with each new game release. That's why I like making this thread from time to time.

But I hope more people will vote, because a base of 100 or more voters seems solid enough to make some conclusions, but it's only 62 votes atm, which is a bit underwhelming...
 
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I feel tempted to add LGPE as a poll option even though the game is not released yet, but I will wait.

When it is out, I will either add it to this poll, or make a new thread altogether.
 
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Damn, this is a tough choice. On the one hand the original was the innovator but functionality wise it only got better from there. I ultimately chose BW and BW 2 for perfecting pretty much all aspects of the game up to that point. But I also gave a node to Sun and Moon for just having a few features that I always appreciated. Mainly the ability to make you're protagonist Black, the Poke Pelego which I still think is probably the single best thing to ever happen to this game, no more HM's, and FINALLY making EV's and IV's comprehensible to me.
 
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For me the top three would be:

3. B2W2
Although the Gen 5 Pokémon weren't my favorites, I did enjoy the game and all the new features it added. The Pokémon World Tournament alone probably helped me contribute at least 70 hours to total play time and I wish they could bcoude it in more games.

2. ORAS
I could barely remember anything if the gen 3 gams since I'm quite old now and played them when they originally released. I figured they would be good but I had no idea how good they really would be!

The Dexnav is still my favorite feature to date. I seriously wish they would include this in all games as it brought the fun back into catching wild Pokémon. You never knew what you would come across. I remember one Absol was near perfect with its hidden moves and almost took out my whole time while trying to catch it.

The amount of rare and legendaries you could catch and the post game episode really added so much and made it feel like one of if not the best to date.

1. HGSS

It was a tough choice between this and ORAS but in the end, it's still my favorite game to date. The pure amount of content alone was enough to make this one of the best games ever made. Being able to do the gyms for both Kanto and Johto was probably one of the factors that made it my most favorite. Having your Pokémon following you around was one of the best features too. I personally like how there was night and day, affecting which Pokémon could be caught. The bug catching contesting made it more fun too. All these small things really contributed to make it the most enjoyable of the series.
 
My top-3 has been this for awhile:

1. ORAS
2. Emerald
3. HGSS

To round out my top-5, I'll include these two:

4. XY
5. Yellow (soon to be replaced by LGPE I'm sure)

Ruby was my first game, but I was pretty bad at Pokemon at the time and the game had hardly any post-game, I'd say my first REAL adventure was Emerald. I was familiar with the region and the Pokemon, and the additions to the post-game were awesome. I've clocked literally thousands of hours on multiple profiles of Emerald, I've gotten all the Battle Frontier Gold symbols, and enjoyed many link battles with friends and other kids at school on that game.

ORAS was the first game to knock Emerald off the top spot, and that's because it reasonably encompassed everything I loved about Emerald in my childhood, but with a fresh look and new features, ORAS, to me, was the closest thing we've had to a perfect game, the only thing it was missing was the Battle Frontier, if it had that it would've been perfect, ABSOLUTELY perfect.

Third goes to HGSS, a game that came out when I was 12, I was one of the few of my friends to get this game. Most of the kids were stuck with DP or Platinum, and some of the kids even had old Johto games and were just in awe with how the new game looked. I also had many fun times on this game and for some reason it just looked so fresh and modern even compared to other Gen 4 games. These games if it weren't for my Hoenn bias could easily give ORAS a run for the title of "perfect game".

XY had a lackluster post-game, but in my area brought about a mini renaissance of Pokemon, all the high schoolers were playing Pokemon and it was no longer seen as embarrassing to play Pokemon like it had been for the last few years prior to XY. XY brought about some really nice mechanics and obviously looked great too.

Yellow was a game gifted to me by an older cousin of mine, who quit after Sapphire, he gave me Yellow, Gold, Silver, Crystal, and Sapphire, this was by the time that I already had Emerald, and Yellow quickly became one of my favorite games, as a kid I always thought any tie-in to the anime was cool as hell, so I'd even name my guy Ash and play through and catch all the same Pokemon as him, these days I play through Kanto games as "Red" though to respect the game world canon, and I plan on doing so with LGP as well.

I can confidentally say that Gen 5 and 7 are among some of my least favorite games, not because they're bad, but as someone who buys every game, having to play through Unova and Alola four times in a row is frustrating, I STILL haven't finished UM and M, just because S and US took me long enough as is, that I'm worn out of Alola.
 
It's hard but I put Ruby/Sapphire because they were my first games and I do love them still. It's close with Emerald and HeartGold/SoulSilver & Black/White though, they're also very good and still kind of nostalgic for me.
 
I can confidentally say that Gen 5 and 7 are among some of my least favorite games, not because they're bad, but as someone who buys every game, having to play through Unova and Alola four times in a row is frustrating, I STILL haven't finished UM and M, just because S and US took me long enough as is, that I'm worn out of Alola.

It seems like buying both versions isn’t for you then, and it’s perfectly fine.
 
1. Crystal/HGSS- Call it nostalgia, I don't care, but Johto is still my favorite region of Pokemon even after all this time. And the Johto Pokemon are, in my opinion, still the best designed. Sure, nowadays people complain that Johto can't stand on its own, but it's not meant to. It's supposed to compliment Kanto, and it does that perfectly while still maintaining its own unique identity. It's also one of only two regions where I like all three of the Starters. And it had the best mythology, the best Legendaries, and the best Mythical Pokemon. Don't @ me. Johto is, in my opinion, the Pokemon series at its finest. However, now that Crystal and HGSS are out, G/S are effectively trash. Don't bother with them if you can instead play Crystal and HGSS.

2. XY- Ridiculously close second. I adore Kalos as a region (it's so pretty,) I love the fairy tale vibe it gives off, Lumiose City is my absolute favorite city in the Pokemon world, period, and Kalos had the best new batch of Pokemon since Hoenn. It's also the other region where I liked all three of the Starters. I think Johto perfectly managed to blend mythology, culture and modernity into its setting with a clear Japanese vibe. Kalos was almost able to do the same with a western vibe. It just needed a bit more. Sadly, a third version never happened, but it could have elevated Kalos even further. Imagine a fairy forest where you catch Xerneas or a desolate wasteland for Yveltal? That kind of stuff missing is what holds Kalos back.

3. Platinum- DP are garbage, but Platinum is a wonderful game. The story is the perfect mix of present and weighty (unlike Gen I and II,) but not overbearing (unlike Gen VII,) and with a story the writers where actually capable of doing justice to (unlike Gen V.) I think Sinnoh had one of the weakest batches of Pokémon, but Platinum at least made them available within the main game and added more non-Sinnoh Pokémon for good measure. I’d say Platinum is the main series at its most balanced. It’s great. Plus it’s got the best ‘evil team hunts down legendary’ plot in the series.

4. Emerald/ORAS- Let’s be clear, RS is as garbage as DP, but Emerald and ORAS were able to fix all its problems and then some. Hoenn has one of the strongest casts of Pokémon (along with Kalos and Johto,) and the region is just so rich and vivid and colorful and exotic. It’s a region that could not come to life as it deserved in the GBA. Good thing ORAS exist. The evil teams are atrociously bad in RS, but Emerald makes them marginally more interesting by pitting them both against you. Meanwhile ORAS fleshes Out their motivations to the point where they actually make a modicum of sense. The Delta Episode was...not great on its own, but the lore added to Rayquaza was spectacular. Overall a fun, creative region with cool Pokémon.

5. Yellow/FRLG- I’ll be honest, this is only as high as it is because nostalgia. But every time I get to choose Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle for my main playthrough, I’m 11 years old again. Kanto is bland as a region but still quite fun. The original Pokémon have their duds, but they also have some serious homeruns. And FRLG added the Sevii Islands, whose concept alone forgives the execution. No matter how old I get, I always find myself coming back to Kanto in some way.

6. Alola- Pokemon in Alola are pretty hit-or-miss. I love Rockruff, Toucannon, and the not-Litten Starters. I hate the Legendaries of this Gen. As a region, Alola is pretty cool but it’s, IMO, the poor man’s Hoenn. The only aspects it does better are the culture and characters. The reason I’m not putting USUM as the definitive version is that while it added a lot of stuff to the original games, it was weaker in other aspects. Namely the story. SM had a better story than USUM. However, the games as a whole suffered from an overabundance of unskippable cutscenes. They served to flesh out the cast, but they got in the way of the journey. They’re probably among my least played Pokémon games to date.

7. BW/2- yup. Unova is my least favorite set of games. While BW2 are slightly better than 1, they’re still not very good. I hate the region and it’s linearity. It just completely lacked the charm of the other regions. The roster is my least favorite in the franchise. I hate most of the designs and the ones I like are only okay. And the story...oh my god what a terrible story. Look, they had good ideas and good, lofty concepts, but the writing talents just weren’t up to the task of developing them. I’d rather a simple story that’s well-done than an ambitious story that fails so spectacularly hard. There’s just nothing I find enjoyable about these games, with the exception of using them to transfer my DS Pokémon to my 3DS games.

Not listed: the original paired versions that got overshadowed by better third versions/remakes and thus have become entirely obsolete.
 
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In order:

1. Platinum
2. HGSS
3. BW2

None of the others are even close, they all have significantly flaws that detract from the experience. These 3 are easily the most balanced experiences.

B2W2 are propulsive. I can't think of any other game that just blasts you out to enjoy the Pokemon world in its sprite based potential. The music really sells it, with the crunchier guitar compared to BW proper. My biggest gripe is we never got a sprite based 3DS game, and sprites look AMAZING in 3D. I'm kind of miffed by how little developers made 3D sprite games, with Nintendo only releasing three 3D NES games, none of which were Mario. Bleh. One day I will tear the code of Gen V apart and make it 3D with beautiful season effects like Pokemon dioramas.

Ugh, now I'm imagining Donkey Kong Country in 3D and the missed opportunity hurts.
 
Okay, I'm in the middle of my weird timeline playthrough... Probably closer to first third if I do remakes. Basically, I'll have a better answer later. I've long declared B2W2 as my favorite, decrying Sinnoh... But I haven't made it to Unova yet. I took a break to play every *$%& Kingdom Hearts Game, including the original DS releases, and now I'm back to my Platinum file. Was a little lost, but I'm back to-- really, really enjoying Sinnoh. I played red, then emerald, then crystal, now I'm on platinum. It may be my favorite so far.

Now, I have to qualify some things. I happened on a used DSi XL, a system I used to think was ridiculous, and now think it is the finest handheld Nintendo has made. (Parallels to my feelings on Sinnoh? Eh, we'll see.) I wanted to see how different playing on a DS Lite felt and it removes some of the magic. It makes me feel like the other gens are at a disadvantage because the game is so lush now. I imagine how great Emerald could feel with a larger screen and larger pixels. (There's no upscaling with DSi XL. Just bigger pixels so the resolution is the same, unlike the disaster of playing the 3DS.) But Sinnoh is also the first game to feature heavy 3D effects to showcase how good DS games could look when handled artfully.

I really disliked ORAS, which was weird at the time as I loved the other remakes and for a time, Hoenn was my favorite region. I still have the fondest memories of it when I was growing up and the real adventure I felt deciphering the braille, running into Rayquaza on Sapphire, getting lost in the tall blades of grass only to stumble upon my Banana Brontosaurus, Tropius. Playing Emerald was fun, but I don't think anything could live up to my experiences as a kid. And that's fine.

What wasn't fine was taking weeks away from the main game, often needing days long breaks as I vowed to finally catch Feebas and get a Milotic...

milotic.png


Only to be met with the backsprite from hell:

milotic.png


Just....

hqdefault.jpg


I am going to quote the man himself here because I need to know why. Why.

The ones doing the fighting were the Pokemon, so what you would see in front of your eyes was the back of your own Pokemon. And if we were going to go to the work of drawing out those backs anyway, we wanted to put the effort into adding details there as well for the players to discover. Like, for example, the wings on Clefairy's back, which look like a bow.

Okay, so I am guessing the surprise is the eyebrows looking like a halo. Okay, except Milotic is such a strikingly colorful Pokemon and you managed to fit so many larger Pokemon in there without losing what made them cool. I feel like this is a commentary. All, "Yeah, you can show off this cool Pokemon to others, but you'll never experience its beauty yourself. Vanity leaves you nothing but a flesh colored noodle of sadness. With hair. Or something." I spent more time searching for Feebas than playing the adventure. I was the noodle.

So as of this moment I am enjoying Sinnoh the most. Maybe because it hasn't been revisited and I didn't love it in the first place? I don't know! Either way, it feels fresh and the music is actually really great. I found it unmemorable compared to other gens, but it sometimes reminds me of Steven Universe. It's so atmospheric, distinct, and lived in that it doesn't always need to be memorable. And when it is, it catches you off guard. Alola is a much better attempt at musical identity than Kalos, but the 3DS games just don't blend into the world the same way Gen V and prior do. I'm hoping it's just a result of the 3DS not being able to perform at full quality, but not compromised enough to force creativity.

I can't wait to play Gen V again to really see how I feel in comparison.
 
Please note: The thread is from 5 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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