Regarding favorite generations and nostalgia, I think I have posted my thoughts on this before but I’ll post them again since the topic came up once more. This whole thing about someone's first generation also being their favorite doesn’t apply to me because I started with Gen 1, but my favorite is Gen 5. While I have many positive memories from Gen 1, I don’t care much for it anymore and I actually find it overrated nowadays. The extreme focus it has gotten in many other generations (notably Gen 2 and 7, but also 6 and 8 as well as 3 and 4 to various extents) has also made my feelings towards it more sour. In comparison, Gen 5 is my favorite because it is the generation I had the most fun playing. It is not my favorite because of nostalgia because I don’t find it old enough to feel nostalgic for… yet. It is getting closer, though. It will be 10 years since the English release of B/W in just two months... where did all these years go? Time flies.
Anyway the real reason I’m posting here is because I came up with a some new unpopular opinions, so here they are.
I have never understood the hype for Goomy or Snom. While those are fine Pokémon, I don’t think there’s anything really special or unique about them.
First, we have Goomy. Gen 6 introduced many great Pokémon, but while the fandom at large seemed to fall in love with Goomy, I have personally never cared much for it. In fact, I like the majority of the other Gen 6 Pokémon better than the Goomy line. I’m not a huge fan of slimy things, so that’s probably the main reason. I have also never found Goodra to have any unique or special niche in battle, something I feel that all other pseudo-legendaries have. I have used Goodra twice on two different teams, and while I liked it a bit better afterwards, it is still my least favorite pseudo-legendary without any doubt.
Then there’s Snom. Apparently, this is one of the most popular Pokémon from Gen 8? I don’t get it. While I think it is fine, there are many similar small Bug Pokémon which I like about equally or better than it. For me, the best thing about Snom is that it evolves into the much more awesome Frosmoth which is an awesome Pokémon with a cool design.
One discussion that seems to pop up rather often is whether the 2D sprites or 3D models are better for Pokémon. My possibly unpopular opinion here is that I liked both the sprites and the models. I think the sprites were really good, especially in Gen 5. Gen 4 & 3 had several good ones too, and I think even Gen 1 & 2 had some sprites that were pretty good. But I like the 3D models too. I think they mostly did a great job with them in the 3DS games, but I like them even better in Gen 8, the Switch allows them to really shine. While there are both sprites and models that could have been even better, I still like both in the end.
I don’t think D/P are the worst Pokémon games. I won’t deny that they have issues, but I think they had a large number of positives too. New and awesome Pokémon, good training spots, a great post-game, the P/S split, better movepools for most Pokémon, and I think Sinnoh is a really great region, my second favorite after Unova. On the whole, I think I’d rank D/P somewhere in the middle if I were to rank the main series Pokémon games. I would place them right below S/M, which is interesting since I feel that those two pairs are very similar to each other in many ways. If anything, the big problem for D/P is not necessarily that they are bad, but rather that they are obsolete. There’s no reason to play them now when Platinum exists. But even so, I still think they were good for their time, I had tons of fun with them back in 2007-08. With that said, my least favorite Pokémon games are still a certain pair from Gen 4… but it isn’t D/P.
Not sure if this is unpopular, but this is something I wanted to say anyway. I think I have partly said it before, but I might as well say it again. As stated earlier in this post, Gen 5 is my favorite. B/W & B2/W2 are my favorite Pokémon games. But… I don’t want it to stay that way. Ever since the end of Gen 5, I have wanted a new generation and new games to take their place and become my new favorite Pokémon games. But that has yet to happen. I think the ones that got the closest so far were X/Y which are awesome games, but they didn’t quite reach the top. I really want the series to move forward instead of backward, which is what I feel that it has been doing in recent years, starting with Gen 6 and then sadly continuing from there with almost every new game release. In the past, I wanted both Gen 6 & 7 to become my new favorites, but it didn't happen, and by Gen 8, I had sort of given up on the whole idea.
I guess the above is also partly tied to why remakes are my least favorite type of Pokémon games. If there were to be new remakes of an older game pair (for example, D/P remakes for Gen 8) and those would turn out better than the main games of the generation, then I think that would be a bad sign for Pokémon on the whole. Because if the best game of a generation is a remake, what does that say about the quality of the new generation? To me, it would say that the quality of the new games are not very good and that an older generation is better, as the remakes have shown by being better than the new games. Fortunately, this has yet to happen as I do not personally think that any of the remakes we have gotten so far have been the best games of their respective generation.
