• A new LGBTQ+ forum is now being trialed and there have been changes made to the Support and Advice forum. To read more about these updates, click here.
  • Hey Trainers! Be sure to check out Corsola Beach, our newest section on the forums, in partnership with our friends at Corsola Cove! At the Beach, you can discuss the competitive side of the games, post your favorite Pokemon memes, and connect with other Pokemon creators!
  • Due to the recent changes with Twitter's API, it is no longer possible for Bulbagarden forum users to login via their Twitter account. If you signed up to Bulbagarden via Twitter and do not have another way to login, please contact us here with your Twitter username so that we can get you sorted.

Why do so many people hate gen III?

*glass breaking*

Now I know why travelling in RSE was annoying. Thanks for the "too much water routes" guys.

Hmm... Well... Hoenn is my favorite generation. I don't hate it, but- There could've been more storyline. I always like that.

Most of the game progression was a bit of a maze too.
 
I only started playing Pokémon last summer, and I played them on emulators (I do own a DS/Platinum/Emerald/FireRed now) and for me, the third generation was either the best, or tied with Johto.

Before playing Pokémon on the emulators, I had VERY limited knowledge of the whole franchise (thought Togepi and Shuckle were Gen I Pokémon), but knew some of the basics from playing Pokémon Stadium at my cousin's house. I never had the nostalgia factor associated with Gen I and II, so that's out of the picture.

First, I played Silver. It was fun, but I was still figuring everything out (I tried to make sure I had one of each type on my team) and got lost trying to get rid of Soodowoodo. I've come back and played Gen II games the most, I think, but that's because I was able to go through them the fastest. After beating it the first time I moved on to FireRed.

FireRed was fun. I considered it a Gen I game because of the available Pokémon (no trades) and enjoyed seeing Team Rocket. Other than that though, it was boring and I've only beaten it once more (for real), and played Yellow once. Gen I is probably my least favorite generation.

Then I played Sapphire. It was my absolute favorite, despite getting stuck and resetting once. Awesomely unique Pokémon (caught a Ralts really early) that were nothing like any I'd encountered before. I knew these guys only from the anime, so I picked Torchic and used it, Ralts and some others, like Sableye. It had such high replay value. I've gone back and played these games a disproportionate number of times. Far more Pokémon to encounter than in the others, and if I really wanted to use an Ampharos/Kadabra team I'd go back to Crystal.

By knowing I'd never be able to trade, that whole negative aspect was thrown out the window. I played Gens II and III so many times and would probably say Gen III is my favorite (Gen IV is LONG and the Pokémon mostly suck).
 
i just have all my qualms with genIII because it didnt have night/day and some of the pokemon were just poorly designed. imma looking at you whismur.
 
I think because several things.
1 Many Many water routes (RSE). One town even requires dive to get in!
2 Gameplay was sort of different (faster pace) than Gens 1 and 2.
3. FRLG had "help", which was mostly intended for n00bs, throughout the whole game, EVEN IN THE TITLE SCREEN! You can turn it off, though.
4. Very Few Gen II and I pokemon (RS)

But i like genIII a lot. It is also almost glitch free compared to gen 1 as well (only glitches were ones by sharking)
 
Twilight Princess, despite being a solid game with no real discerable "flaws" seems to get alot of flack simply because it isn't an older title or a newer title.

really? I have yet to play the game past the first hour or so, but I heard the game got bashed quite a bit for quite a few reasons (and not just because "it isn't Ocarina of Time"). I've heard complaints like holding the player's hand far too long into it, over-saturation of Heart Pieces, over-saturation of dungeons, items being useless outside of the dungeon you find them in, Wolf Link not living up to his potential, the new villain being reduced to a pussy and dropped in favor of Gannondorf, the brown tones you'd usually expect in the various first-person shooters flooding the market, etc. In spite of these put-downs, I haven't seen many people outright hate the game, but I have seen them regard it as a very weak entry in the franchise.

It's his own fault?! When a developer makes a game, it's never the customer's fault if they do something wrong. It's the fault of the developer for forcing the customer to do something that isn't inherent to the nature of the game. The customer shouldn't have to keep the instruction booklet, they should be able to play without it. I mean, the blame should be the developers, because they should have forseen and prepared for the possibility that someone might have thrown away their instruction booklet.

you know, back in the day, adventure games and RPGs like Zelda and Final Fantasy would come pre-packaged with a bunch of detailed maps, enemy guides, item lists, etc. Hell, Earthbound was bundled with its own player's guide. Nowadays, games can easily provide everything in-game via text without running into space issues. However, they still don't seem to serve all the deeper secrets on a silver platter for you likely because they know there's the internet nowadays. The fact that anything was provided in an instruction booklet alone is nothing short of a miracle, but if you lost it, you have absolutely no reason to bitch about it.

Then lets move on to: Kyogre/Groudon are myths!!! To achieve their terribly half baked plan, Teams Aqua and Magma decided to take a LEGEND and regard it as fact. That's like saying that I'm gonna go out and look for the Chupacabra so I can trick him into killing all my enemies. It's completely stupid. Lucky for them, the game developers decided to validate their pathetic beleifs.

in a world where espers exist are proven to exist (as either humans or animals) and actual documents cite animals as being capable of altering weather, traveling through time, destroying mountains, and generally doing things that go against all known scientific logic of physics, it's not difficult to see that creationist theory could have practically dominated this world (and the next generation would only prove said theory true). Though it is rather ironic considering biology seems to be a major part of the Pokemon franchise as a whole (but said biology's laden with a shitload of rubber science).

In any case, the Orre games (Colosseum and XD) were two other great aspects of 3rd Gen. Thoroughly underappreciated games as a whole, only because, guess what, it's not another boring as hell Stadium game. These games finally moved away from tradition, and only enrich the Pokémon Universe even more. We had an actually threatening organization, that controlled the entire Region, and were twisted enough to completely change the nature of Pokémon for their own purposes. Plus, it was full of wacky, yet interesting characters, with a divergent design, but pretty good nonetheless.

Most of all, I liked how Colosseum made a much better job at making the player use the 2nd Gen Pokémon. I could realize that many of them were actually pretty good and cool, and the awful distribution they had in the actual Gen 2 games was made even more apparent. I also enjoyed the plot, the delving on an otherwise taboo concept as is stealing Pokémon, and the dynamic of Shadow Pokémon, which made you spend some time training every Pokémon available, instead of just catching and dumping on the PC, which is what you usually do in mainstream games. Sadly, the Purifying Chamber in XD detracted from this otherwise great endeavor. Still, XD also had a good plot, and polished the low aspects of Colosseum, making it also a good game in its own right.

I'm actually surprised Colosseum and XD aren't getting hate here. I could see all the hatred they got back in the days, and it wasn't pretty.

^this. Given, the games were riddled with flaws, like that fucking bitch Mirei, and a few graphical and audio aspects were actually a step down from the Stadium games, albeit some were restored in XD (BTW Orion, while you do mention a decent reason the Pokemon's cries never change each generation, do keep in mind that they have been altered in the Stadium games before), they were still pretty good games and it was very nice to have a console RPG for once. Those people who put it down just for not being Stadium fucking disgust me, and I've seen some still complaining even after Battle Revolution gave them exactly what they wanted: an excuse to play with your Pokemon in 3D that is otherwise completely empty as its own game.

Even if they were designed specifically to hook up to the portables (namely to get gen 2 Pokemon on there), Colosseum and XD stood far above that and were easily enjoyable on their own. Hell, they deserve recognition for being the only RPGs in the series with a storyline deviating from the tried and true formula of "badges and league with an evil team tossed on the side". I also have to say how refreshing it is to actually start a Pokemon game with level 20 evolved Pokemon that already come with TM/HM/egg moves rather than the single-digit-leveled Tackle and Growl fests the first quarter of most the portable games end up being (not to mention an adult protagonist). Albeit XD went back on all of that, and Colosseum still started out with weaklings using a pair of Zigzaguma or whatever, but that part of the game hardly lasted long as your Eifie and Blacky tore them to shreds.

Seriously though, I loved those two games for the specific reasons you stated, but while it did give more than the Stadium games in that regard, I find it also took a lot away unnecessarily. They got rid of rental pkmn, which I didn't like, but I guess I can understand, since they'd have to re-do 386 models all over again. I found the models and attack animations were slightly less refined than in the Stadium games in certain parts, but the features that dissapointed me the most were the lack of any equivalence to a GB tower in those games. Instead, you had to spend extra money on either pkmn box or the gameboy player. Oh, and the horrible transfer system that they had! Whereas Stadium 2 had up to twenty boxes that you could easily store your pkmn from your GB games into, the Colosseum games forced you to trade them to the other games (after you've finished both games, to boot), which made transfering very tedious.

um, all 386 models were programmed into the game anyway. Otherwise, trade wouldn't have been compatible with the rest of generation 3. Also, if you like playing games on a TV and play GBA games that aren't Pokemon, you should have a Game Boy Player anyway. And Pokemon Box existed as a separate game if you needed to transfer that bad (and we have Pokemon Ranch now). I will agree, though, that the storage on Colosseum was beyond fucked up. Three boxes? But I guess it doesn't matter when you can't even catch enough Pokemon in the game to fill those boxes, with the only possible way to increase your number of Pokemon for trade being to transfer a Tsuchinin and evolve it into both a Tekkanin and Nukenin (though in XD, you could catch some wild ones now). What's even more fucked up is that Colosseum takes up almost a whole memory card (or at least back when they had the 59 block cards), and despite having more boxes to store Pokemon, XD takes up less blocks on the memory card. What the hell happened there?
 
It's his own fault?! When a developer makes a game, it's never the customer's fault if they do something wrong. It's the fault of the developer for forcing the customer to do something that isn't inherent to the nature of the game. The customer shouldn't have to keep the instruction booklet, they should be able to play without it. I mean, the blame should be the developers, because they should have forseen and prepared for the possibility that someone might have thrown away their instruction booklet.

If this were true, and you didn't need an instruction booklet to play a game, I'd never have known about the regis in RSE because I had Sapphire which was given to me by a friend and never got booklet or knew anything about it prior to playing and even in game the clues are not clear ebough, you know about something, but uless I looked online, I never would have found it so sometimes the instruction booklet can be useful.

Anyway I have concluded there are 3 main reasons people didn't like Gen III:

1) Too Many Water Routes
2) No backwards compatibility with GSC
3) Change - too used to Kanto being around or having Pidgy and rattata to find.
 
Just look at the good things it brought us: abilities, natures, contests, different berries you can plant yourself, an easy to use box interface, way better looking graphics then before, more stuff to do with multiple players like record mixing, contests and berry blending, secret bases, and the battle frontier in emerald.

Personally, I don't see natures, contests, more berries, or secret bases as good things. So that doesn't hold up well in defense towards me, but I don't hate the generation. I just don't like it as much as the previous two. I dislike the 3rd and 4th generation equally. I just want to catch, train, and battle Pokemon. I don't want any of this contest or dressing them up crap.
 
Respectfully, those are optional features. IMO GF still kept the main core of pokemon intact with Gen III. But they also smartly added many new features that would appeal to newcomers, or vets that were beginning to bore of the same-old-same-old.

And we should look at it through the developers perspective. They don't want to just keep doing the same thing over and over with updated graphics. That's just boring. But to take a step into the unknown, while still maintaining that core game play that appeals to the vets, truly shows how smart these developers are. Plus they made the excellent decision of introducing FRLG, which proved that they weren't just going to leave the previous generations behind and start fresh.

Which is why I have the utmost respect for what they did with Gen III. Now Gen IV on the other hand... while fun yes, I just get the feeling the retreating back into their "tried and true" methods.
 
Personally, I don't see natures, contests, more berries, or secret bases as good things. So that doesn't hold up well in defense towards me, but I don't hate the generation. I just don't like it as much as the previous two. I dislike the 3rd and 4th generation equally. I just want to catch, train, and battle Pokemon. I don't want any of this contest or dressing them up crap.

then don't use any of those features. Geez.
 
I like Gen III because of the new stuff. But Gen IV recyled the same features.....and made the games worse.
 
I didn't hate Hoenn/Generation III, I just felt that the GSC were better. You started off finding both new and old mixed together in the Johto Region. And after beating the Elite Four, you were allowed to RE-VISIT the Kanto Region and collect more Johto/Kanto pokemon in that Region.

The Water-routes didn't bug me at all in Hoenn. I just used repel. I did like the new style and everything about Hoenn... only I wish that you were allowed to revisit the Johto-Kanto Regions.

That is what made GSC the best... 250 Pokemon to catch (within the two games), 16 Badges, RED & BLUE player, extra Storylines (Johto and Kanto), Pokegear!
 
Hoenn is my least favorite of the region, but I have to admit that it introduced natures, abilities, berries, and my favorite Pokemon of all time (Latias).

However, what bothers me is that most of the designs were lame (I dislike these families: Whismur, Lotad, Seedot, Wingull, Nosepass, Baltoy, Numel, fossils, Volbeat/Illusmise, Plusle/Minun, Sableye, Makuhita, Meditite, Chimecho, Regis) and there were too many legendaries. Sinnoh has a limited Pokemon pool and too many legendaries as well. I did not appreciate the contests.. I lost to a Barboach in the cute contest, wtf.

I also think that Hoenn is disliked because it's a disappointment after GSC. We expected 24 badges, lol.
 
Its one of me favourites!
For a start things actually started to look somewhat realistic
The contests were a good sidequest although I couldn't ever really be bothered with them
The evil team(s) in RSE were cool, and seemed more thought out than in Gen I and II
Some people were put off that it was a 'fresh start' for the franchise but it was needed, otherwise the games would start to feel old and repetative. But it also helped creative the nostalgia in FRLG
 
um, all 386 models were programmed into the game anyway. Otherwise, trade wouldn't have been compatible with the rest of generation 3.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that, so then they had no excuse?

Also, if you like playing games on a TV and play GBA games that aren't Pokemon, you should have a Game Boy Player anyway. And Pokemon Box existed as a separate game if you needed to transfer that bad (and we have Pokemon Ranch now).

I guess I didn't mean to complain that I, specifically couldn't play them, but I just find it silly that the N64 version had two features (TV playability and a massive storage system) implemented into the actual games, whereas the games that were technically next gen, couldn't even give it to you. Now that I think of it, I am complaining that the GC games forced us to spend way more on features that should have already been there (that is, if we wanted to use them, which I did).
 
I'm only about halfway through Sapphire right now, and I have to say, I can't stand it. I don't mind that the Pokemon are different (I loves me some Plusle and Zigzagoon), and abilities are freaking amazing. But the number of times you have to go back and forth, all over Hoenn... before you can even get Fly! It drives me crazy- it's such a complicated country.

And the GBA was never really that strong of a system to begin with. I never bothered buying one when they came out...

I will always love most any Pokemon game (that is not on the Wii. ugh), but Sapphire was not my thing. I am going to get FireRed really soon though. I hope.

My preferences- I LOVED all of them, 'cept III. Gen IV was just too cool, but you just can't beat the awesomeness that was Gens I and II.
 
Well, my first pokémon game was Saphire, though I played slighty the previous ones. I don't hate it, because it was the first I played from the beggining to the end. Those who started with generation I and II will probably find Hoenn weird, as it was nothing related to Kanto and Johto except some Pokémons and the fact our char came from Johto. That's why I think there's some hatred towards it. D&P wasn't so radical, because we already experienced the "shock" of changing completly of Continents. I never played D&P alot, though.
 
um, all 386 models were programmed into the game anyway. Otherwise, trade wouldn't have been compatible with the rest of generation 3.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that, so then they had no excuse?

Actually having all pokemon programmed into RS was for a reason, so that they could have compatibility with FR/LG when it came out. If it was not the case, then Deoxys would not have been programmed into RS, would just left until FR/LG, but no it was in RS even though without cheating you couldn't have it in game until FR/LG came along and you had a deoxy event.
 
Well, i guess it was because it threw you into a new world... Gen 1 and 2, you were in a familiar place: Kanto, which is attached to Johto. But Hoenn just seems like it has no similarities to either. It was really weird for some of us to make the change over. o_o

And the fact that it just seemed... incomplete, to me. Not in a literal way with Gen 1 being physically incomplete (yay Cinnabar!) but more of... it had so much going on, something didn't seem right.

I liked the games the first time through, but its one version i can never just reset my game and play again. I've played Red at least 20 times through and never gotten bored. Same with Gold. But my Sapphire... i just can't. It's not as fun and nostalgic.
 
Well to me the third gen felt a bit like setback after Generation II.

- There's no night and day system.
- It was the first game that wasn't compatible with the previous generations (GSC had the time capsule)
- There are more berries but I hate planting them. Not to mention all the messages you get: Found berry x. Picked berry x. Soil returns to soft loamy state. Found soft loamy soil. Want to plant berry x? Planted berry x. Berry x is growing. Want to water berry x? Watered Berry X.
And repeat:dumb: This could have been made a lot shorter. Its a bit easier in generation IV since you can now water more plants at once, but planting berries is still a pain and an annoying chore in the game, as opposed to the simple easy system back in the second gen where the plant remained and you don't have to water the freaking thing.

Also I don't like third gen Pokèmon. It was by this time (In my opinion) they started to decline, and gen I and II Pokèmon aren't as common in RSE.

I grew bored of Pokèmon during the third gen, Sapphire is the game I've owned that I've played the least, simply because I got bored and restarted it all the time. Heck in Generation I I actually completed the Pokedex at one point... never got close in the third gen.

As opposed IV has some of the same problems with the Pokèmon, but at least with the GTS you could trade from anywhere, useful for people like me who don't know many others who own the game. It brought the day/night system back and many of the old Pokèmon are catchable again (I was actually quite happy to see Rattata again:3 Its my favourite of those common normal-types you find anywhere, Sentret, Rattata, Bidoof and Zigsagoon)
 
You know, after reading a lot of the replies in this thread and the opinions of fans in general....

I wouldn't be surprised if the reactions over RSE and it's changes are the reasons why GF seems reluctant to change up the series. Ironic, people complained that Johto relied way too much on Kanto, yet threw a fit when their precious Pidgeys and Rattatas were absent from RSE.
 
Please note: The thread is from 11 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.
Back
Top Bottom