Your LEAST favorite Pokemon game

[Barfing Ogres]

Honestly, my least favorite was Red. I felt that it didn't really have anything in regards to game balance, especially with Psychic types, and the story felt the most lackluster in the series. That and I generally was not a fan of Kanto, too bland. I absolutely adored Yellow by comparison, though maybe that is just the ability to get all the starters legitimately in a single play through without trading.

 

[Battaman]

Replaying gen1 and 2 you get to see just how much better the series have become in terms of actual gameplay, however I take the time they were created into account. But yes, even as an old timer I can't stand playing anything before RS, and even they are a stretch.

 

[firepanda]

Of the main series, the only games I really don't like are RBY. I realise that they're loved due to the nostalgia factor for many people, but that's really all they have going for it. I started with RSE so RBY has none of that for me. They are buggy; have terrible, underdeveloped and unbalanced mechanics; an unintuitive level flow; none of the little bits of lore and charm that make the later games so good; and bland Pokemon and area design (Cinnabar, Lavender and the route below Lavender excepted).

These criticisms also apply in part to GSC, although they were a massive step up. They biggest improvement was the step up to Gen 3, particularly with regard to battle mechanics. Finally, DPPt ironed out the few remaining niggles to pretty much produce the standard of games we have today. It's also worth noting my lack of love for Kanto amplified further by the endless overenthusiasm the internet and Gamefreak seem to have for the originals.

 

[ocelotlrama jaguar]

I was never really fond of Ruby and Sapphire, only because I thought these games were rebooting the series as a whole. When those games came out, I didn't frequent Pokemon sites, much less look up information about data hacking. I didn't know many of the Pokemon that didn't appear in RS were actually in the game's data all along. I thought they just did away with them. To this day I hold that resentment, which I realize is petty considering we are now in Generation VI and I really should be getting over it. Will I get over it? Probably not. That really freaked the flying hell out of me since I thought my most favorite Pokemon were gone forever. Then FireRed and LeafGreen came out and pretty much reassured me the opposite of what I was thinking.

In RS's defense, if what I mentioned wasn't an issue, then I would have no problem with these games. Yeah, the water sections are tedious, but the music was great! I love the Pokemon of the region and the characters are memorable. I am probably going to be burned on the stake for saying this, but I thought the Generation II games were a lot worse than Generation III in terms of gameplay. A lot of my favorite Pokemon were either exclusive to RBY, or could only be captured post Elite Four. There were also sections that were a chore to get through and just not fun thanks to the discrepancies in wild Pokemon levels. I'll admit it was a fun game at the time, but playing them again just proved to me that they are only good for nostalgic purposes. I really didn't enjoy it as much.

 

[garrison-san]

Gates To Infinity did feel like a bit of a let down to me, but in part that's because I enjoyed Explorers of Sky so much - it was always going to be a hard act to follow.

I was all poised to cast my vote for Pokemon Snap, on the grounds that it made limited use of its central concept and felt incomplete (partly as a result of only featuring 60-odd of the then-current 151). But, thinking about it, it was such an innocuous and colourful little game that I suddenly find myself conjuring up some very pleasant memories of sitting there watching pokemon prance around in their natural habitat as I drifted down a river. It was definitely a good game to chill out with, if nothing else. Plus, I did appreciate that the pokemon had their anime voices and not their usual tinny game cries, which made them seem more organic to me, and put Snap well above Stadium in that regard. So, nah, I just can't do it in the end - which makes Stadium my least favourite pokemon game that I've played, largely by default.

 

[IlluminationTheory]

I was never really fond of Ruby and Sapphire, only because I thought these games were rebooting the series as a whole. When those games came out, I didn't frequent Pokemon sites, much less look up information about data hacking. I didn't know many of the Pokemon that didn't appear in RS were actually in the game's data all along. I thought they just did away with them. To this day I hold that resentment, which I realize is petty considering we are now in Generation VI and I really should be getting over it. Will I get over it? Probably not. That really freaked the flying hell out of me since I thought my most favorite Pokemon were gone forever. Then FireRed and LeafGreen came out and pretty much reassured me the opposite of what I was thinking.

In RS's defense, if what I mentioned wasn't an issue, then I would have no problem with these games. Yeah, the water sections are tedious, but the music was great! I love the Pokemon of the region and the characters are memorable. I am probably going to be burned on the stake for saying this, but I thought the Generation II games were a lot worse than Generation III in terms of gameplay. A lot of my favorite Pokemon were either exclusive to RBY, or could only be captured post Elite Four. There were also sections that were a chore to get through and just not fun thanks to the discrepancies in wild Pokemon levels. I'll admit it was a fun game at the time, but playing them again just proved to me that they are only good for nostalgic purposes. I really didn't enjoy it as much.

I remember the fear, vividly. As far as anyone knew up to that point, a generation consisted of two games, plus a third version, all set in the same territory, and that was it. I did not, for a moment, expect to get any of those pokemon back - "What? We don't get to fill in the blanks? I can't even trade from the old games?!" But in retrospect, I think it was a masterstroke.

Ruby and Sapphire had a real "Not in Kansas any more" feel to them - we really were orphaned from everything we thought we knew about Pokemon. No comfort blankets like Team Rocket or Professor Oak or half the pokedex!, and so many new ideas we take for granted now, like the criminal plot dovetailing with the legendaries, all those weird places like Meteor Falls and Mt. Pyre, these diverse environments where you can never be quite sure what's round the corner - RS turned a game and its sequel into a franchise that could run and run. RB and GS created a legacy, but RS gave Pokémon immortality.

Unova gives Gen III a run for its money, and I think BW is the best as a game and the one I usually rank top, but I don't think any other generation has felt as weird and unexpected and new and occasionally scary as Ruby and Sapphire did. A completely different beast. I don't expect ORAS to recapture the magic, but I think the game and plot and locations and characters are still robust and interesting and absolutely worthy of the remake treatment, so I'm looking forward to a different kind of magic.

 

[Norzan]

Three way tie between R/B/Y, G/S/C and B/W.

Red/Blue/Yellow - Balancing issues, barely non-existant plot (i don't play a pokemon game for the story but even i have a limit), Team Rocket is a joke and Giovanni is so bland and generic that i'm afraid he'll dissapear in his blandness.

Gold/Silver/Crystal - Terrible level curve, Johto feels too crammed and small compared to the other regions and it was because of the inclusion of Kanto which is a barren wasteland with barely anything to do except defeat the Gym leaders and it takes like an hour to do so.

Black/White - The region is extremely linear, the story and the characters are so boring and uninteresting except for Bianca (even she's not that interesting and Ghetsis mannaged to be even more bland and generic than Giovanni), it removed features that were in Gen 4 such as Super Contests and the Underground and it didn't add anything in its place, wait it added the Pokemon Musical which is the worst piece of crap i ever seen in a pokemon game, it barely added anything to the franchise except for Triple Battles and Rotation Battles which i hate both and the games were just a chore to go through. What saved Gen 5 for me was the pokemon.

 

[Tyrfing]

Finally, a thread to release my hatred for.... X/Y! Team Flare is the most boring excuse of a team known to man, because their plot is just pathetic (Lysandre's chain of thought: Screw everyone, everyone is EVIL and must die! Only my idiotic subordinates must live! We'll make everything beautiful on a mountain of corpses!). At least Team Aqua was so ridiculously homicidal you at least questioned why they love their water types so much. Also, I should add the music is terrible. Compared to the concert Black and White was, these games are saddening. Almost every route uses one out of two or three themes that quickly gets repetitive within thirty seconds. Post-game is practically non-existent (except for Looker, that was easily better than the main story), which makes you rely on Wi-Fi, which I am not good at, leaving that option out.

So many new guys were too late into the game to use it was ridiculous (although I will give it that Johto was far worse when it came to that), and Gym Leaders were eyebrow-lifting to sleepworthy. The whole game is pathetic with Exp. Share and only decent without. Oh, and worst of all, the Hydreigon family wasn't present until almost post-game (Yes, I count Victory Road as post-game, since the Flare died, and the E4 has no story involvement in this game, another thing that B/W did better; they at least mentioned the threat of N, even if only remotely.) Overall, this game deserves to burn in a fire (or perhaps in a flare?) and I pray that ORAS and Gen 7 (Or Z, if you think that'll be a thing)

 

[EXGShadow]

All the mystery dungeon titles. I tried, but couldn't see the appeal of these games.

In the main series, R/S/FR/LG.. they improved a lot of the old game mechanics, and they could be amazing, but in some aspects they feel like a step back from GSC (no nighttime?? no sprite animations??). I still played and enjoyed them, but I feel they could've been much better done and that's why they are my least favorites. And Diamond/Pearl comes close with all those stupid looking GEN IV pokemon and the worst regional pokedex of all time.

 

[Lysson]

I wouldn't say I hated any Pokemon game but like this thread says I do have my least favourites.

Spin off games: Pokemon Dash (My wrist hurt for about a week after playing just an hour of this!) and Pokemon Ranger 2 because ironically it gave me nightmares because as an only child and having a little sister who so annoying annoyed me in the game (and you never had a sibling before in a Pokemon game) I had a nightmare that she was my actual sister and she used Darkrai to kill me... heh heh... But Ranger 3 is one of my favourites of all time!

Main game: Maybe R/S/E? Everyone I know in creation worships gen 3 so when I finally got to play it... it just didn't live up to the hype for me but I am REALLY looking forwards to the remakes as I hope that will fill my expectations! I also didn't really like the Teams in Hoenn as much... but in Emerald at least it showed a bit more off and I loved the teams more then.

 

[G50]

For the main series games, my least favorites were FRLG. This was mainly due to the tough time I had back then adjusting to the major changes added into these remakes. (Natures, Abilities, etc.). I do like all main series games, but of them FRLG would be the ones I liked the least. Also due to the unusual evolution mechanics for certain Pokemon I didn't really like.

 

[garrison-san]

My least favourites from the main series would be, easily, Black and White - especially the sequels, which I grew strangely bored with half way through and have yet to finish (it doesn't help that I also associate them with a very difficult time in my life). The games are not without merit - I appreciate the effort to make BW more story-orientated than previous gens (albeit not entirely successfully, I would argue), and the decision to make TMs reusable gets a definite thumbs up from me, but the overall emphasis seemed to be upon the huge glut of new pokemon above all else, and I was underwhelmed by how little these games actually brought to the table in terms of innovation (I agree with Norzan about Musicals being an utter joke compared to Contests). While not an ostensible reboot in the way that RSE was, the impression I got was that this was an attempt to recapture the freshness and excitement of Kanto somewhat, in giving us a region populated with nothing but new pokemon until the post-game, and the "back to basics" approach of moving away from side quests like contests. Sadly, it was an approach that fell rather flat for me.

Honorable mention to Blue and Red, which haven't exactly aged well, and the sheer amount of glitches and broken game mechanics therein make them almost unplayable to me now. Given that the concept was new and still finding its feet at the time, I can only judge some of their faults so harshly, but even so, there's not much going for the original titles now other than the nostalgia factor.

 

[elveonora]

Reading this thread, we can come to a bizarre conclusion that all main rpg Pokemon games suck ._. there's hate for each generation from at least one person, so shrugs, is any of them even good in that case?
In my eyes a perfect game would be one that takes all the good things from Gens IV. and V.

Gen V. is weird in that even though it brought lots of good things, they also removed the little things that made the previous generations good (contests, walking Pokemon etc.) so it's more of a downgrade than upgrade.

 

[teleport]

I'm surprised no one mentioned Hey you Pikachu!

So I will;

Hey you, Pikachu!

 

[Gold_]

Pokemon Conquest. I got it and played for a bit, and I just plain didn't like it. And the concept... What is this even...

 

[HeroOfDarkness]

Pokemon Conquest. I got it and played for a bit, and I just plain didn't like it. And the concept... What is this even...

I really liked the game. I found it a refreshing taste for the series. I am waiting for a new Ranger game, or a Conquest 2.

I can't really say I have a "worst" Pokemon game. But the one I don't really come back to is R/S. Those two games are just too bareboned compared to the rest of the series. At least Gen 1 has the nostalgia factor. I hope OR/AS changes this.

My favorite is Gen 4 though. (P/D, and HG/SS)

 

[Ivysaur]

Spin-offs would be cheating, so I have go with (gasp) HeartGold and SoulSilver.

Disclaimer: even the worst Pokemon game is still a pretty good game. Unless you really get down to the nitty-gritty details, there isn't a whole lot that distinguishes one game from the other, all sharing the same formula and working off similar mechanics. Where HGSS fell short for me is where the originals really shined.

Gold and Silver were daring and surprising. They weren't the cold reboot Ruby and Sapphire were, yet they're still the most important games in the series. From the day-and-night cycle to the in-game clock, held items, breeding, the phone function and the radio, the reorganized bag, happiness, Shiny Pokemon, baby Pokemon... barring the phone and radio, can you imagine a modern Pokemon game without one of these components, let alone all of them? On top of a brand new region that offered 100 new Pokemon and introduced memorable characters and stories, you were even able to visit Kanto, where it all started, and battle the old PC at the end.

All this did a pretty good job at shrouding how, unfortunately, how poorly paced they were. Kanto was trimmed and Johto never quite came into its own, as if it couldn't stand alone with Kanto right next to it. The leveling was terrible and all over the place, and throughout the game wild Pokemon and trainers alike were significantly underleveled.

While HGSS restored most of the areas that had been neglected in GSC's Kanto and added a little more to do in both regions, the pacing was never fixed. The story wasn't expanded and a second opportunity to flesh out Johto and really bring it into its own went uncapitalized. Popular features like rematches, Contests, the Underground, Secret Bases, and the Battle Frontier were either bogged down, unchanged, or weren't included at all.

HGSS are the definition of by-the-books, and that's a big, big issue when the very games you're remaking are celebrated so much because of everything new they offered at the time. The timing couldn't be worse; this was Pokemon at its most conservative and unimaginative.

 

[elveonora]

So shouldn't you in that case hate G/S/C more than the remakes? And I agree that Pokemon distribution/availability (wild grass and trainers' alike) is terrible. And as you said their levels too. If a remake of a remake ever happens, if it were on me, I'd greatly improve the Pokemon variety but making it also more logical at the same time. In HS/SS, like all Kanto trainers have either Gen I. or Gen II. Pokemon, save two one of which has Cherubi and the other Bronzor. EDIT: I forgot Spinda as well. It just all felt uneven/inconsistent.

 

[Wispy Willow]

I'd say, out of the main series games, it'd be either R/B or X/Y, Red and Blue because... I don't relly know why I didn't like it, but the reason for X/Y is, whie I tend to ignore plotholes and/or a bad story, I need... game...ness to keep me into whatever it is I'm playing (for the single player mode at least) and X/Y 1: Was way to easy with the Exp. Share constsantly leveling up your 'mons to the point of overpowered (not that I'm complaining about how much easier it makes grinding) and 2: As I mentioned before, I need gameness to keep me interested in the single player mode, and guess how interested I was about X/Y's microscopic "post-game." Not at all, that's how much.

As for non-main series games (full games, not those apps from the e-Shop like Dream Radar and Pokedex 3D Pro,) the origonal Ranger, PMD 3 and PBR. Ranger because 1: the issue with core mechanic of the game that can be sumed up in one boss battle: Charizard (fortunately they did it right in the sequels,) and 2: Steelix, that's all I need to say, PMD 3 because the overall game is vastly inferior to PMD 2, PBR because, while you do get some Mystery Gift 'mons, there is only the tinyest shreads of a story and it just feels like a 3D version of the Battle Tower from the main series games.

 

[Nidokingdom]

Diamond and Pearl, for sure. If you didn't start out with Chimchar, your only fire-type option to catch in the whole game was Ponyta. Freakin' Ponyta. Not that I'm a huge fire-type fan, but the fact that Game Freak didn't bother to add more of them when the Pokedex allowed for it is disappointing.

I just started replaying my copy of Diamond yesterday, and I'm already incredibly bored. I just can't seem to get into the story aspect of the game, and none of the Pokemon at the beginning are really fun/interesting to use. I'm trying to power through since I've never finished Diamond, but it's a grind.