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Gold/Silver because it introduced a bunch of awesome new mechanics, all of the new Pokemon introduced were fresh, and you could go back and beat the Kanto region whenever you finished Johto. Why none of the other Pokemon generations included this concept is beyond me. It is a great way to lengthen the games and provide some sweet nostalgia.

Fire Red All The Way!

At 2/11/13 05:47 AM, Chrausner wrote: In my opinion, Pokemon Platinum.

Ah, finally someone who agrees with me.

Frankly, I haven't played any of the games after Gen IV, but up to there Pokemon Platinum is my favourite game. I'm not sure why I prefer it over Gen II and its remakes. I just thoroughly enjoyed playing it and ended up clocking more than 130 hours into it, which is an amount of time I rarely spent on games anymore nowadays.

I still like gen II as well though. I was a bit disappointed with the HG/SS remakes, but the original Gold and Silver are still fine games in my opinion. For the rest, I don't think I'll ever bother with the original gen I and gen III games again. Gen III was the weakest in my opinion and gen I hasn't aged well at all.

I'm going to go with Fire Red too, because it's a better version of the original which I hold dear as it was one of the first games I ever played. Not to mention the modding community is excellent if you prefer playing on an emulator.

At 9/16/12 01:02 PM, Xiicubed wrote: pokemon is for 8 year old kids

Mmhmm, and you are any better?

I'm going to say Black and White were the best in the series, because they managed to have a story without ever losing its momentum. The first two generations of Pokémon didn't have stories, really; Team Rocket's actions were random gameplay events, the only character who came off as a character instead of a plot device, an obstacle, or a one-dimensional faceless civilian was the Gen2 rival Silver, it was all pretty blah until at least Crystal. Crystal had just as little main story as Gold and Silver did, but it DID have a degree of mythos building in the Suicune subplot, which at the time seemed like a lot and got me really excited. The Gen3 games had something of a story, but it was rather light and poorly handled, with the villains' goals being so completely boneheaded that a 5-year-old could see the flaws in them. I'm sure that was intended, but it certainly was less than ideal for an RPG to have such a light story. I didn't play the main two games of Gen4, I've been told that they aren't that good and I was off of Pokémon playing for a few years anyway, but once we get to Platinum we finally have a game where the excitement is driven in large part by the story, climaxing when you have to travel through a weird place on the other side from the main world to stop an evil person from remaking the world as an empty, dead place... And then completely dropping the ball, because before you can go on to the postgame content you have 10 hours of ineffective grinding between you and the Pokémon League, of which the Champion is not only no pushover, she's the exact fucking OPPOSITE of a pushover. Perfect IV Garchomp, anyone? Yeah, and that gap between the end of the real story and whenever you're ready for the League is, of course, completely barren and empty not only of story content, but of any real way to make the seemingly endless level grind less tedious.

Then Pokémon Black and White came out and fixed everything. The story was not only more in-depth than that of Platinum (albeit somewhat less expansive, since Team Plasma's Ghetsis wasn't really trying to destroy and remake the world the way Team Galactic's Cyrus was, just conquer it), with no fewer than three individuals showing serious character development, it also managed to hook itself into and right through the Elite Four battles. N defeated the Champion before the player character got there, and Team Plasma's castle rose from the ground around the Pokémon League, and the work to capture the cover legendary, to defeat N, and then to defeat the real main villain Ghetsis, all took place AFTER the Elite Four, which made the grinding for the E4 seem a lot less intrusive since I was still emotionally involved with the quest.

Oh, and you know what else helped? The single most effective level grinding system in Pokémon yet. Generation 1 didn't have a way to speed up grinding: a player either had to catch the Legendary Birds and hope they'd be enough to carry them through, or else they had to spend days fighting progressively less effective wild Pokémon. Gen2 introduced Trainers calling for rematches, but it was entirely in the game's control, not the player's. Gen3 did the same thing as Gen2. Gen4, or at least Platinum, had the Vs. Seeker, which put some control of the grinding speed in the player's hands, but not even nearly all of it. But then Gen5 came out with Audino grinding, and so many good places to grind against Audino, which sped up the process immensely, gave the player most of the control over grinding speed (at least within the limits of the RNG), and while grinding will always be a little tedious and immersion-breaking, it certainly wasn't as bad as the earlier generations had it, or even as most JRPGs have it. Ghetsis may have been the hardest Pokémon main villain yet, with the OP-as-all-Hell-dreigon coming in at a significantly lower level than it's supposed to exist, but I still spent less time grinding for him than for Cynthia, because the Audino grinding system was simply so much more efficient than pulling out the Vs. Seeker and crossing my fingers.

"But Soulmaster", you say, "If you love Gen5 so much, why choose B/W over their sequels Black 2 and White 2?" Good question, dear reader. But remember what the Soulmaster said about the story carrying you through the Elite Four in Black and White? Apparently Game Freak either didn't like how that worked out, or at best decided it was now a spent trick after one use, because it was back to the old system in B2/W2: beat the criminal boss, THEN you get to move on to the Pokémon League. And while Iris' redesign was more feminine in dress and had a hairstyle infinitely more pleasing on the Soulmaster's eyes then her original look, her incredible newfound beauty didn't make up for it all feeling like a giant epilogue. What's more, I feel that B/W Victory Road had an overall better design than its equivalent in the sequels, a much more epic feel that reminded the player constantly of the size of the mountain and, at the end, when the Soulmaster had his version of Hilda standing at the top of the mountain, he really felt like he'd accomplished something in getting her so far. B2/W2 doesn't take as many opportunities to build up the mountain as being so large, instead just being a long series of rooms not entirely dissimilar from any other Victory Road in the series thus far, and as such, once the player reaches the end, it feels to me more like the relief of passing a huge rock-solid turd than like the exhilarating sense of accomplishment of having climbed a mountain. What I'm trying to say is, there were a number of places that B/W shook up the Pokémon series formula to what I felt were awesome results, and when B2/W2 returned to the older versions of those aspects it felt like a letdown.

At 9/15/12 05:40 PM, darkjam wrote: fire red for that's all i have to say. what about you?

*Hi-Fives darkjam* i'm right there with ya, me and my lil brother use to compete hard in that game.
-Lil brother: I got a level 30 (insert pokemon name here)
-Me: my charizard is level 60 now
-Lil brother: 0.0

Pokemon Gold.Ahh the memories

For me, it was the remade versions of Gold and silver, (Heartgold and Soulsilver). The Sinnoh region was pretty cool, but i liked the fact they put two regions in the one game.
To have the pokemon walking around with you as well was just freaking amazing.

One World,Three Generations and unlimited adventures
Emerald.

At 9/15/12 05:40 PM, darkjam wrote: fire red for that's all i have to say. what about you?

You might laugh but I quite like stuff that differ from the original formula for pokemon games like pokemon stadium and pokemon ranger.

My favorite one, I think. Out of all of them, had to be. Generation 4. Platinum , Pearl, and Diamond. I had just had so many memories on that game with friends. When we were little , that's the game everyone just sat down for hours on end playing, trading Pokemon, and having a blast. I have beaten those games , sooo many times :)
I also really like Heart Gold , and Pokemon Blue.