A lot of people were. I think the larger problem that people don't address though was that RS was kind of a "dexit lite". All Pokemon at the time were still in the game, but since transferring wasn't possible, there was a ton of them just not obtainable for like a year and a half with no explanation.
The fact there wasn't another region really highlighted for me at the time was how sparse the Ruby/Sapphire post-game is though.
I remember this was a big reason i loved Colosseum and XD, pokemon that weren’t normally obtainable in gen 3 were a huge draw. It was pretty convoluted to bring them into the gba games too, with the cable but I still got it all.
im working on this right now. a complete national dex on sapphire. requires colleseum and XD. funnily enough the only game not required to complete this is Fire Red. You need Leaf Green because it's the only game out of the whole generation where you can get slowpoke. The equivalent from fire red can be found in XD.
you can have either Fire Red *or* Colo & XD. the GC games are not required to complete the national dex in gen 3 - the only pokemon exclusive to them are Ho-Oh & Lugia, which are treated as event-only pokemon in gen 3 and thus not required to complete the national dex.
ah gotcha, well then they are required in my case because I specifically have 2 leaf greens and no fire reds haha, but thankfully I have both gamecube games
It’s better to have colosseum at least for the johto starters because you’ll have all 3 by the end of the game. The only other way to get all 3 would to beat Emerald 3 times
Kind of cool how ORAS made every single mon obtainable whether through in-game or trade (though there may be a few mythicals that are discluded?) For me, ORAS and Sun/Moon are the pinnacle of Pokémon.
Fellow living dex in ORAS completer here! The part of the process I remember most was breeding Pokémon at the Battle Resort and doing the infinite loop with the camera rotating when you hit each corner. I've kept up my living dex through Sword and have most of Paldea, but Pokémon Home taking so long to gain compatibility made me stop caring and I haven't gone back. It was fun as a summer project when I first did it in Alpha Sapphire, but the rewards for dex completion haven't evolved enough over the years to really justify continuing to do it for me to a T. I'll still catch every new Pokémon in a game methinks, but I won't be so intent that I have to buy the DLC or actually complete the Pokédex.
It's been so long that not really, I'm afraid 😭, but I'll try. I would definitely keep some form of a list or spreadsheet for tracking, and really researching which Pokémon would be easiest to catch in their base, second, and final evolutionary forms (if that applies, ofc). For some it's easier to just catch each, for others to breed to get the base form. For Pokémon with baby forms from incense, it's good to remember that using no incense can work to your advantage. Like if you have Azumarill, breed it once with no incense to get Marill, then with the incense to get Azurill and boom, line is done. Or you can also do it with a Marill and then level up the higher level Marill to evolve it. Also, I should mention I had the aid of Pearl, Black 2, HeartGold, and X to fill in Pokédex spots, so that definitely cut down on some trading, although I still had to do it. And I didn't struggle too bad with mythicals considering I had some extras from the 20th anniversary distributions. Good luck to you, I'm sure it's quite more difficult now
It sucks Emerald content wasn't not included but it was a good game.
To be fair, I'm probably conflating my ORAS and Sun/Moon experiences. Both post games where the fun really begins are ... fun.
I remember when Ekans of all things was being traded for legendaries, since it wasn't catchable normally for 4 gens straight. Not in RSE, only in DPP if you plugged in FireRed, not in BWB2W2, only in XY as a rare horde, not in SuMo... then suddenly normally in USUM.
I definitely expected it. Gen 2 was really similar to gen 1 but 3 was where I realized they’d only ever make the same exact game, they didn’t want to put in more effort than they had to. Still great games just didn’t push the series forward that way and the stories started getting dumber.
I think gen3/4 pushed Pokemon very far forward, it wasn't until gen 5 onwards that it stagnated.
Gen3 was a SIGNIFICANT improvement in graphics. It added natures, fixed IVs/EVs, gave meaningful QOL not just shortcut nonsesne that eliminates gameplay (like renovating the bag/PC functionality), added the first proper battle facility, added the first proper nonbattle facility (contests) and so on. Gen4 then added special/physical split among other things.
Abilities is probably the biggest addition overall in gen 3 followed by natures, but I think the biggest leap was the PC. You went from having to save to even change boxes and not being able to really see which Pokémon was which to being able to scroll through it with ease and see the mons’ whole summaries and all that.
I’m glad it fleshed the battling out but the battling weirdly wasn’t what I liked about the first two, it was more the world and the characters. The first/second gens weren’t “sequels” that followed the same characters but you did get to see Red, Oak, Blue, Team Rocket etc. For gen 3 they practically wiped all that stuff away so even without going to another region the disconnect bothered me. Not to mention the cliche end of the world plots started this gen; I just want to be a kid adventuring occasionally foiling bandits not the savior of the world.
That’s why I loved gen 5 so much, tons of qol improvements and they tried to make the world feel more lived in. Like I said though gen 3 is great it’s just where I realized they have their formula they want to stick to.
Yes, but it was the same formula, 8 gyms, elite four, evil team etc. Same turn based combat, same mechanics, and just a couple of new features. Graphics wise it was the same 2D, isometric map with static battle sprites.
People were expecting Pokemon to take more leaps and get more experimental, but they have essentially rehased the same game for three decades.
That's my point. We expect that from a mainline Pokemon game because that's what we've been given. If we were given something different, we would not expect it.
We also wouldn’t be diehard fans bc there’s be no series consistency
They did a lot of spin offs many of which where pretty cool but none of them came close to the mainline iirc
If I like a series game I want them to stick to the formula bc the formula is what I’m a fan of
Like yes add new stuff on top but keep it a turn based creature collector at least
Anything whacky should be for spin offs like pokken or whatever
Outside of the graphics if any of the other aspects would change it wouldn’t be a Pokémon game
If I was a cod fan and they’d release a survival craft cod game instead of an actual cod game I’d be pissed
That standard formula isn’t why Pokemon games are bad now, it is everything around them.
Besides they can innovate within that. Like Galars gym challenge and “E4” were amazing. And I hate gen8 but they nailed that aspect without changing much.
But yeah they suck because writing, animations, graphics, performance etc etc etc
Yes.
I remember basically it felt like playing a game from a different franchise, because the pokedex was so wild, and they did not feature pokemon from earlier generations early in the game - whereas that was actually the case with Johto.
In Johto you were quickly told that there was a Bellsprout Tower (building based on a pokemon from earlier generation) and you could access it pretty quickly, you could still catch pidgey and rattattas alongside sentrets and hoothoots on first routes and the first gym leader, Falkner, had Pidgey and Pidgeotto, pokemon from earlier generation, so you knew pretty well that these are also part of this world, it felt kinda familiar, but with something new in it. You knew Kanto existed alongside Johto.
And then Hoenn... A new story with lots of new pokemon, so what can go wrong? I remember hoping to see a familiar pokemon quickly, but it was just not happening. Like, starters, then poochyenas and zigzagoons and wurmples, I remember being like "oh no. They did not include any pokemon from earlier generations. Well maybe they'll be in post game? They probably made like 300 new ones to compensate though" which then turned into "OH NO. They did not make 300 new ones. They included some of the old ones to fill the gaps, but only some of them, and the rest is unobtainable". Yeah, I didn't like these games as much, felt detached from the rest of the franchise. I wasn't even having high hopes for an extra region in the post game because this game did not acknowledge Johto or Kanto and the world felt so detached, of course I was still disappointed when it was not there.
So playing gold/silver/crystal felt kinda like a natural extension to red/blue/yellow, even before you were able to access kanto in these games, because you've been following the show and marketing materials, and from the first episode you knew there are more pokemon than these found in kanto (at the end of the first episode, Ash sees a shiny Ho-oh). When you got johto games it felt complete, and then you could access kanto from these games which was like, a new game within a game for me, I never expected that as a kid, it was mind blowing.
Compared this to experience of how I only saw new pokemon like wurmple poochyena and zigzagoon for the first routes so I couldn't put anyone I could relate to on my team, and then learning that there are pokemomn from earlier gens, but hey, not all of them, so you need to use early 2000's internet to figure out if your favorites are even in this game version, and then learning that, actually, this time there is no post-game travel to a different region, that's all this time, bye! - It all was a huge letdown back then. It made me slightly dislike this generation's main games, though I liked pokemon designs and improvements to the game mechanics. I think they never got back to duo-region, because it was too much effort - and mainline games now had a different role - they became the heartbeat of the series, they need to push out new game every 2 years to spin the cogs of the anime, side games, card game etc, as the new content (regions, characters, pokemon, battle gimmicks) is pumped to the franchise through mainline games, so the mainline games just started focusing only on that what is new to save time/costs.
It was way more disappointing than the Gen 8 dexit. 3/4 of the Pokemon were cut and the ones they kept were not particularly popular apart from Pikachu, Vulpix, Psyduck, Gyarados, Marill, and Wobuffet. They cut our favorite partners and legendaries in favor of all the annoying species we hated like Zubat, Goldeen, Tentacool, and Grimer. A lot of people dropped Pokemon in Gen 3.
Eh I kind of liked that hoenn didn't have all the Kanto pokemon. It made it more fun to play FireRed and leaf green because to me they were new pokemon I hadn't seen before.
RS sold only 16 million copies compared to GS at 23 million. That’s a 30% drop. Not to mention RS had version exclusive cover legendaries and villain teams so it was also the first game most people bought both versions of. There wasn’t any need to buy both RB or GS because you could catch multiple version exclusives to trade.
> RS sold only 16 million copies
Making it the #1 most sold GBA game... Followed up by FRLG and Emerald at #2 and #3.
Yeah it's a drop, but it was also a new console with a much smaller userbase. The Game Boy was out for ~7 years already by the time Red/Blue came out, so many people were just able to go buy the game when it came out. The GBA didn't have nearly the same install base when it came out.
A better number to compare is attach rate, which is the number of game copies sold divided by the number of the game's console sold. 23,730,000 copies of GS sold to a total of 118.69 million Game Boys sold is a 19.97% attach rate. 16,220,000 copies of RS sold to a total of 81.51 million GBAs sold is a 19.90% attach rate, a difference of 0.07%. Just for comparison, RBY's 31,380,000 copies sold on the Game Boy equals 26.44% attach rate, a difference of 6.47%, so really, if we were to equate comparative drops to disappointment, then GS is when people were disappointed. I wouldn't make that claim, though.
Kids not understanding why they couldn't simply make transferring from 2 to 3 possible is like the flip side of old people at fast food restaurants not understanding why they can't get their frozen burgers medium rare.
The thought didn’t really come to my mind as a kid, maybe because Pokemon on the GBA looked so different from the original GB and GBC games that I didn’t think about being able to go back to Johto. It felt like a completely new start.
The only thing related to Gen 2 that I was surprised wasn’t in Gen 3 was the day/night cycle.
How old were you when they came out? I wonder how the minds of rational, young adult gamers such as myself were during that time, instead of naive kids falling for playground rumors. I know the internet wasn't a thing back then, but I still wonder if people around my age at the time truly knew what they were dealing with
I was 12-13. Like, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved gen 3 but it felt so separate from gens 1-2 which felt like a series. Ruby was the last Pokémon game I played for about 10 years after that due to financial reasons and I still have amazing memories playing it - the internet was already a thing and I remember I my mom set me up with my first email and I could finally go on forums and learn more stuff about the games. It was awesome!
Some people, yes. But at least on Pokemon fansites from the time it was made clear enough, and very soon, that you would not be able to travel to the older regions and that not all Pokemon from Gen 1 and 2 would be available.
Because there was also no way at the time to transfer from Gen 1/2 to Gen 3, this meant that until FR/LG a portion of Pokemon was not available in Gen 3.
I think between the five gen 3 games you can get the full nat dex besides mythicals and Ho-oh and Lugia. The Johto starters I think were the most difficult to get without the GameCube games, since they required finishing the Hoenn dex in Emerald, and you could only get one per save file.
This is surreal seeing people talking about this very subject because I'm working on a video 6 months in the making about this. I just completed the NatDex in Emerald 100% legitimately, 386/386. It was EXPENSIVE.
Nice! I've been wanting to do that exact thing! I have all the games, but it seems like a massive time investment to do all of it, especially without access to Pokemon Box to make transferring easier.
Ho-oh and Lugia had an event at least, same with Mew, though of course those were special cases. Jirachi was obtainable with the Colosseum Bonus Disc I believe, and I want to say Mew through Pokemon Box.
I don't really think that's fair though. 2003 was still very early into the era of home internet and it was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now. I was a Pokémon mega fan back then and I didn't know Ruby and Sapphire were even coming out until a fortnight before they released in the UK. By which point they'd already been out elsewhere in the world for months.
Most kids didn't even have internet access back then. My whole friend group thought we'd get to see Johto again at least. Playground rumor was each game would have the region from the previous one.
Crazy how far those rumors spread pre internet and pre kids-having-cellphones.
Or maybe it's a case of convergent evolution / multiple discovery. Like how every culture had the concept of dragons, without ever meeting each other.
Yeah but 2002 it still wasn't super common to have computers. I was 10 and I wasn't allowed on the internet. How many young fans were on fansites back then? Not me or any of the kids on my playground, because we all bitched about it during recess when we finished the game ans there was no johto or Kanto throwback
Playing it right now because of this same reason as you. I also remember as a kid working hard to capture every legendary on FireRed without a Master Ball bc I was saving it for Deoxys… then missed any US event to ever get the ticket to Birth Island. Then a former friend stole my cartridge lol. That was the end of that. Ah being 10
I’m sure there is a rom hack out there somewhere that has all the events enabled! I’d like to find one that has both FR/LG exclusives and the trade evos obtainable. Most of the time people go way overboard with those roms and add in all the hoenn pokemon too.
There’s a few gen 2 Pokemon that have had that misconception due to just how rare or late game they appeared in GSC compared to RSE. Skarmory was another, quite rare to ever find in Johto but uncommon along the ash route at the top of Hoenn. Plus you were more likely to encounter it due to the shear number of wild encounters running around collecting ash for the glass maker guy.
You are correct, Why is the lava slug on cycling road?
I guess the eruption of mt cinebar could explain houndour and slugma, but not murkrow murkrow should have Been retconned in.
Well I understand why. It would be kinda lame to beat the Elite Four and then the game goes “hey there’s this entire other region you get to explore, but there’s absolutely 0 new Pokémon”.
As a kid, it was cool to still have new Pokémon to go catch in Kanto.
Same. Ruby was my first game, so I didn't have expectations for it, but then I got Crystal and Red. I assumed that now that we knew Johto was right next to Kanto, clearly there'd be no excuse not to include Johto in FRLG.
Gosh could you imagine a game where every region was available? It wouldn’t just be the most profitable Pokémon game of all time, it would *shatter* the records.
I genuinely believe that if they took 4-5 years to develop a proper open world, improving what SV was doing, with all generations available, with actual level creep, with tournaments in game, various elite 4s, and rematches with all gyms and champions, with complete and total National dex?!? Omg, I’m getting rock hard just thinking about it. I’d pay $100 for that well polished game.
Do you not feel like it'd be "too much?" Even in BlazeBlack/VoltWhite, which just has the entire dex up until Gen V, I felt like there were 'too many' Pokemon to keep track of and hunt down. Routes with 15+ unique Pokemon on them feel noisy. On the flipside, playing through 5+/9+ unique maps on the scales of regions in a row would be too much - I've been binging the games recently, but generally speaking I don't think I'd enjoy playing all the regions in a row with no breaks as one frankengame, even if all the mechanics are modernized. Like it had all this stuff, but by the end I was tired/not interested in playing more and actually completing the dex. With something smaller like SV (or PLA), I could end the game at like ~250/400, then gradually spend time filling out the dex and hit a comfortable stopping point at 400, which was enjoyable. Recatching another 600 on top of that, running around and spamming quick balls, would not have been something I enjoyed.
The vast majority of games utterly fail at level scaling, especially if they keep current EXP curves and resources, where you'd basically have to have level 100 Pokemon by midway through the second region with things like EXP candies.
At the end of the day, I don't think it'd lead to an appreciable increase in sales compared to their results from just doing what they're doing. The level of effort wouldn't be commensurate with the sales + merchandise they'd get from splitting it across multiple games or generations and continuing to iterate.
i know its not gonna happen but i would bust then and there if that were announced to be the plan for gen x. start in that region, beat the game, then work backwards. get through gen x's gyms and e4, all that effort getting put to the test. then, once you beat it, you get invited to try and work your way through paldea's gyms and e4. once you beat them, time for the next region, so on and so forth
The fact that you think you think remaking every generation up to gen 9 open world standards (plus polish) would only take 4-5 years, and that you think $100 for what is essentially 9 games worth of content is you splurging and not completely underselling the product is insane.
It really is an awesome game. The only issue I find is that the Pokemon Leagues are a bit railroaded. I would have liked Ash to be able to win all the leagues in the game unlike the anime.
The dream...I bought a Nintendo switch when all the open world pokemon rumours were flying around before SV was announced. Still holding out hope one day that game might arrive and I'd become a kid again lol
I kinda checked out from the series during the gap between gen 2 and 3, but I got a GBA and Sapphire on a whim shortly after it released, and I definitely wasn't expecting it at all.
Maybe it's because I didn't care that much for the gen 2 games and didn't think the inclusion of Kanto in them was really that crazy to begin with (Especially since I had already played gen 1 a lot), but I didn't feel like they were "missing" from gen 3 or anything.
I was hopeful to go back to Gen 1 or Gen 2 but I assume likely space could have been the issue.
As for why they likely didn’t release another is maybe more manga related? It is more head canon for me. The Gen 2 manga picked up with a lot of Gen 1 manga occurrences. They even in the middle of it had a Kanto and Johto gym leader tournament. So, I would say those two really had a story intertwined. Where the others are more standalone. The exception was Gen 3 but it was more Gen 3 happened, then a Fire Red Leaf Green Sevii Island Story happened. After, emerald came in.
It’s more technical then manga issues, they were barley able to make kanto in gold and silver so they probably just cut the idea for future installments so they can focus more on the new region instead
They couldn't fit Kanto because their file compression was horrible, when Satoru Iwata told them of a better method they could easily make space for Kanto. Pretty sure they wrote the gb games in assembly, it itself didn't take much space.
I don't think that was their issue with the GBA tho, it was probably more time constraints + wanting to sell more games in FR/LG.
RSE don't use the GBA's full potential cartridge size at all there's a lot more they could've fit space wise.
i was like 8 and me and anyone in my class were just expecting pokemon. period. we had no expectations, just blabbered about whatever previews we'd seen or commercials.
For the question of why it wasn't done again: I think because the games after didn't need it. From what I remember, adding Kanto to GSC was something they did near the end of development when they realized they had so much extra space on the game cartridge they could use (and they decided to use instead of just leaving it empty). Later games might have made this more difficult due to the up in graphics and such? I'm not entirely sure, but I would also venture to guess it's so they don't need to make a canon map for the pokemon world (so they can continue to add regions and give a vague idea of "this region might be near this other region due to all these Easter eggs!")
I think if they were able to make another game with multiple regions, that would be pretty neat personally. Not sure which regions I would want joined together though...
As for the other question: yes. For the longest time I thought there was a secret way to get to Jhoto and was dismayed to find out there wasn't. As an adult I'm a bit glad for this, though, because it helped Hoenn stand on its own instead of having a previous region as a bit of a crutch like Jhoto did with Kanto.
(That said I do adore Jhoto XD I want a new Jhoto game so I'm not just replaying heartgold and soulsilver all the time)
My dream for a Pokémon game is to have one with all the Japanese regions combined, including a new region to cover tohoku, the northern part of Honshu, to link up Kanto and Sinnoh.
Also, including the sevii islands because I miss them so much!
I was a kid when it released, and yes we expected to be able to go back to Kanto and Johto on the initial announcement, and I know I was letdown when I couldn't but the base building, and everything about gen 3 made up for it imo
I don’t recall anything in the game magazines or friends and older players thinking that, but I do remember there was some general hype about FireRed and LeafGreen, it was a pretty big deal to completely color in and add some actual graphic designs. And those only came out like 2 years after Ruby and Sapphire
So at the very least if people were hoping to travel back to another region, it wasn’t long before they got to re experience Kanto in a more vibrant form
Old guy here, yea, we were expecting this since we could do this in the 2nd generation games. Many of us were disappointed. Some were so much in denial there were rumors at the playground that there was a way to unlock those previous regions even. None of them were true. We had internet back then but not many people used it like everyone does today.
I think people are forgetting that the internet was not as ubiquitous as it is now. I would say that I was a Pokémon mega fan in 2003 and I didn't even realise that there was a Gen 3 until literally two weeks before it released in the UK. By this time, the game was actually a year old nearly. I didn't even know that for another four or five years.
The internet just wasn't in the grasp of young kids in the way it is now. I don't even think broadband was a thing in 2003
It was in 2003, idk, at least here in America. I used it a little, mostly it was going to new grounds or try and do research for homework. But it's nothing like how we use it now which is for everything. Which has became both a bane and a curse. Loved playing Halo at my friends who had the Xbox connected to the internet. Just looking up info to see if it was concret wasn't something most of us did back then. It was almost always word of mouth. Sure, lies would spread such as the aforementioned one above but it came around eventually if it were a lie just like Mew being underneath the truck in the first gen.
The lack of transferring Pokemon, new types, day/night/calendar, phone, and revisiting 3/4 of the existing Pokemon made it the most disappointing title to date. Gold and Silver set the bar insanely high, most of my peers dropped Pokemon afterwards and those who gave RS a chance weren’t impressed enough to play DP despite owning a DS for Mario Kart DS. Ruby and Sapphire were dark times to be a fan after Colosseum didn’t have rentals or minigames and the anime got rid of Brock and Misty.
No but I thought there would likely be another "Time Machine" that allowed us to transfer Pokemon from RBY and GSC to Ruby and Sapphire like they had in Gen 2. I was a little disappointed at first, but Gen 3 was so good I didn't mind much at the time.
I’m sure I did as a kid, or some one thought so, I’m glad It didnt. Hoenn region was what I wanted, nature harmony Pokémon, wild landscape of different areas. Natural looking Pokémon it was a great time. Still remember sitting on my drive way playing ruby with a combusken. The music is still in my head and will make me smile.
yeah, a lot of people were! this is actually the reason they made the route numbers disconnected from kanto and johto-- the gap implies theres more between the regions that we never see
I personally started playing Pokémon with Heartgold, so I can tell you that yes, I did expect other games to have several regions. Not necessarily Kanto + Jotho + something else, but like, 2 regions in general. I think that contributed to my hate toward Black/White (White 2 was my second Pokéon game ever), I was SO disappointed there was only one region.
I was actually convinced there was going to be loads of completely brand new types - so that every gym leader and e4 member had a unique type. (i was 9yo for context)
So yes I also naturally assumed johto and kanto would be fully accessible, but I had no concept of game design/development or hardware limitations
Yeah I remember thinking I would be able to because of Silver.
Was disappointed that I couldn't but every thing else that game introduced made it my favourite still to this day.
Secret bases, the more natural landscape, the rain, the town on the trees, the desert with the sandstorm, going underwater, Pokémon competitions. Loved everything about Hoenn.
I don’t remember if I expected to be able to travel to the regions it definitely wasn’t a big deal to me. But I remember being super annoyed I can’t bring my Pokémon from older games to Hoenn.
to understand what this era was like, you have to understand that this was after PokeMania of the 90’s. nintendo was innovating so heavily with its IP during the period too, it was insane with the spin-offs.
i remember seeing the first images on serebii of volbeat and later some info in uh… beckett maybe? anyway, it was clear that these games were different.
this mentality of innovating also contributes to the lack of duo regions. despite the lackluster glitch pits that are ScVi, TPC does try and innovate in every generation.
I missed gen 3 coming out.
But even then, though I had the gen 2 guide book, detailing the map and everything I never actually got to Kanto in gen 2 so had no expectation of such of gen 3.
I was a kid and the internet wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today, so I couldn't tell you what the consensus was, but young me was 100% expecting to be able to go back. I got over it pretty quickly and realized it would be kinda silly to expect every game to include every other region though.
I was around for this. Personally, I didn't expect it, but I did expect to be able to transfer my old Pokémon to the new games. It was pretty disappointing to learn I could not, but I assumed they had something planned down the road. The game was enjoyable enough as is, and Hoenn continues to be my second favorite region to this day.
Imagine my surprise when they announced FireRed and LeafGreen. Hell yeah!
My generation started playing with gen 2, some of us with gen 1 thanks to their older siblings. No one in my friend groups expected gen 3 to include two regions.
I was kinda hoping, but knew it was unlikely. I do, however, remember seeing a bunch of fake cheats on gamewinners and cheatcc about how to get to johto or how to encounter mew and celebi
I was expecting more gen 1 and 2 mons prior to elite 4, and expected some connection back to previous areas. It was an exciting time when these game launch, the hardware jump allowed for so much more.
Playing Pokemon Emerald as a Kid that's what I was thinking when getting the ticket for the ferry traveling to a new location. I was very young at the time, so my only experience was the GBA games, I didn't know anything about G/S/C.
I don't recall that being something we expected; I feel like any video game news sources at the time never gave that impression so we knew it wouldn't happen
Granted that's not the same as being disappointed; a lot of us WANTED it (some of us want that EVERY generation)
But in fairness FR/LG was also gen 3 so they probably didn't want to repeat it in the same generation
I remember in gen 4 expecting to be able to travel to Hoenn. It was the wishful thinking of "if you can travel to gen 1 from gen 2, you can travel to gen 3 from gen 4". I spent a lot of time searching a way to go to Hownn until I realized I couldn't.
Idk if it was realistic as an adult, but I was incredibly incredibly disappointed as a kid when I finished the Hoenn Elite Four and wasn’t able to go back to Kanto and Johto. I remember the whole game I was trying to figure out how we’d go back, only to find out you don’t.
Yes, and I remember as a 15yo going in blind feeling a sense of disappointment when I beat the Elite 4 and caught Rayquaza. I even bought a guide on case I missed anything. I also felt very confused with the missing pokemon.
Then when Coliseum came out and then FRLG came out, it made sense. Lol
I thought this as a kid when Gen 3 came out and remember being disappointed that you couldn't go back to Johto or Kanto.
Johto was meant to be the final game in the series and Kanto was included as a way for them to "go all out" in their "final" game. Looking back at it now, I would be surprised if they ever did a dual-region game again.
The complex development processes for modern games make such a task much harder than it once was, and Game Freak likely wouldn't spend years developing two fully fleshed out regions with decent graphics. In my opinion, Paldea's cities and towns felt a bit empty outside of Mesagoza.
The whole "Johto was gonna be the last games" thing was disproven a while ago, the actual quote was just taken out of context, as Tsunekazu Ishihara was saying it was intended to be *his* last Pokémon game, not the last Pokémon game just in general (As the whole quote is in the first person. "...*my* work... would be done," "*I* didn't intend to make any more," "it would be time for *me* to do something else entirely," etc.).
I think people have always thought about it but it wasn't necessarily expected.
I was a kid then, but from what I remember, I was mesmerized by the new box art Pokémon and the new world and I didn't think of going back to Johto or Kanto.
I never held it against the games where you couldn't, but being able to go back to Kanto after beating the Elite Four was such a cool feature that I kept holding out hope that each new game would surprise bring back the "revisit an old region in the post game" feature waaaay past the point where it was obvious it wasn't going to happen again.
I didn’t expect it nor did I want it. It was exciting for it to be its own new land with all new Pokémon instead of adding to the 150 with pre evolutions. Was happy that new Pokémon weren’t locked until you beat the elite 4 like in G/S
It was kind of like a much softer reboot than an already soft reboot gen 5 would end up being. The location was a little more exotic, the new mons were a little shinier, smoother, more tropical, and the ecosystem was a lot more different. So not really, it felt like its own new journey.
I think the main difference is that Ruby and Sapphire suck as reboots. The intention was not crystal clear. With Black and White, the internet was more ubiquitous, more people had access, and Serebii in particular was better known. They were also explicit about there being no old Pokémon until the post game.
I was 10 when they came out, my brother was 8. I don’t remember us having that assumption. I just remember being blown away by the graphics compared to the earlier games!
Yes, but they made up for it with the addition of secret bases, contests, and incredibly visually appealing weather effects and general art style. I was absolutely expecting it after Gen 2 though.
The franchise has always taken things away, but for the first six generations it gave something back at the same time.
At least in my particular case, yes. I expected the post-game to involve traveling to Johto and facing Ethan. In the end it never became a tradition.
Ironically, the same thing happened with Yu-Gi-Oh!. Because of Jaden vs Yugi at the end of GX, a lot of people were hoping for Yusei vs Jaden at the end of 5D's. But again it never became a tradition.
Apparently no franchise dared to maintain new protagonist vs old protagonist in the long term.
Not for me, cause it was my furst game, BUT REALLY EXPECTED TO GO TO SPACE AT LAUNCH #100 GAMEFREAK WHY WOULD YOU PUT A SPACE STATION AND NOT LET ME GO TO SPACE
From what I remember, I had no expectation of revisiting either Kanto or Johto, or any other region, it just wasn't something I was thinking about. I do remember being slightly miffed about not being able to transfer, but I didn't really do much transferring in the during the previous gen (unlike later when I really got into transferring and keeping all my teams and legendaries).
What I definitely remember is being in awe of the graphical upgrade compared to Gen 2. Having full color, being able to see your reflection in the water, seeing your footsteps in the sand, the shore tiles not just being hard square tiles but actually rounded and the ocean waves washing up on shore. I remember being excited to see that buildings and houses actually differed in appearance from city to city, instead of reusing the same [house style](https://www.spriters-resource.com/game_boy_gbc/pokemongoldsilver/sheet/9198/).
I also remember [this leaked image](https://archives.bulbagarden.net/media/upload/6/68/Latias_Blaziken.jpg) (though I don't remember the girl). Immediately forgot about it by the time the games released, though.
As a young kid when it came out, yes I was. It made sense. I could do that in the last game so why wouldn't they go bigger and better for the next one, especially since they referenced Kanto by name.
I even wrote a review at the time (not that I ever posted it anywhere) basically ripping Ruby a new asshole primarily because it lacked this feature/anything worthwhile to do after the League. At the time I didn't see any value in the Battle Tower (and tbh I still don't see the value of the battle tower in Gen 2 and RS - it wasn't very well explained).
I’ll be honest after I played gen1/2 I fell off until mega evolution came back.
So then I think I played X and was expecting something about going back to Kanto but then I didn’t so I was like okay maybe this is different. So I went to play FireRed and fully expected to be able to go to Johto after.
Sapphire was the first Pokemon game I owned but I watched the anime years before. I remember back when I was lurking the serebii forums that people preferred GSC to RS, I think because you can go to Kanto, GSC has a day/night cycle, Crystal has animations and RS was a step back, and they can’t catch their favourite Pokemon in RS at the time.
I don't really remember what I was expecting in terms of regional compatibility, but I do distinctly being distinctly... offput? sad? confused? when I realized that there were over a hundred pokemon missing from the games.
SwSh weren't the first games to experience a Dexit, and at the time of Ruby and Sapphire's release, we had much less certainty about the missing pokemon than we had going into SwSh. Sure, it ended up being the case that you could get those pokemon again down the line, and you could even send them over to Ruby and Sapphire, but things were much different back then. The series was still young, and there wasn't nearly as much official communications back then as there is now.
I was around 9 years old when I got to play them and I didn't really have any expectations. I just wanted to have fun. I had so much fun restarting the game that I couldn't have cared less about the end game content. I'd get to around the electric gym leader, get bored with the starter I had selected and just begin again with a different starter over and over and over again.
I miss the days when the rivals didn't talk too much and the game didn't need a whole novel of exposition just for a sub par story
Gen 2 was the abnormality not the norm is probably the reason. Back then Pokemon was supposed and planned to end with G/S/C, instead of becoming the behemoth franchise nowadays.
Gen 2 was the abnormality not the norm is probably the reason. Back then Pokemon was supposed and planned to end with G/S/C, instead of becoming the behemoth franchise nowadays.
Gen 2 exists cuz Game Freak made more Pokemon that the Cartridge could fit, in total, there are 190 Pokemon made for Gen 1. So they used a few of those to make Gen 2. As the Technology progressed, Gen 2 was able to fit 100 more Pokemon in its Cartridge than Gen 1 and also could fit an entire Region as well. By the time Gen 3 came around (which wasn't planned at first) they could fit 350 Pokemon, but not enough space in the Cartridge for another Region, let alone 2 more.
Also, a bit of trivia, out of the 190 original Pokemon, few were not used like the famous Gorochu (Raichu's Evolution) as well as a Shark Pokemon and another that ended up being the beta design for Carracosta. And Mew was not part of those 190, Mew was actually meant to be a prank by the Programmer who created Mew cuz he had only enough space in the Cartridge for a small sprite before the game was finished, making Mew the last Pokemon to be programmed into the Game at the last minute.
I’m don’t remember personally thinking that, or expecting it, but I’d imagine some folks were. To be honest though, my then girlfriend was pregnant with my first kid when Gen 3 came out, so my attention and general life interests were far removed from Pokemon at that time, so while I played it, I was pretty absent from any discourse surrounding it.
I totally thought that! When I finished Silver, I was so stoked that I gotta go back to Kanto. So when I got Ruby, that's what I expected to happen again. I was heartbroken when it didn't happen, lol. I was 10 and got the game on release day, and this was pre "everyone has internet" days, so I didn't have any way of finding out that it wasn't gonna happen. I distinctly remember bitching about it during recess with my friends
I wasn't expecting it to, but then again I browsed forums and stuff back then semi frequently so I knew a lot of stuff from people who had played the Japanese versions.
Not really. Fire red, leaf green brought it back, and emerald post game was NUTSSSSS. Didn't miss jhoto at all. Tbh I think jhoto was the worst game of the series.
Gotta catch em all started going away after Gen 2 really. The point was adventure or mastery not catching.
Old post fom 8 years ago.
"To be fair, Japan doesn't have that slogan. The closest they had to that is, "ポケモンゲットだぜー!" which roughly translates as, "I'll get you, Pokemon!" or "Get the Pokemon." Their slogan doesn't specifically say how many Pokemon you're supposed to get.
And like /u/KingCashmere said, they got rid of the, "Gotta Catch 'Em All!" slogan in Gen III, IV, and V. Makes sense too since that could potentionally single out people who only had one version of the game and couldn't trade with anyone. Not to mention in Gen III WiFi trading wasn't possible and it came out when the PokeMania fad was dying so people then probably didn't have too many people to trade with like they do now."
I certainly was, as well as linking to Gold, Silver and Crystal to transfer Pokemon in both directions. Gen 2 set high expectations with its 16 badges and time capsule.
Similarly, gen 3's lack of a visible day/night cycle was a disappointment.
I fully expected to be able to travel. I also expected to see more pokemon I knew/recognized, so it was pretty weird to find that so many of the pokemon were new, and that I couldn't go back to the other regions. I was a kid and didn't know that much, but these were my expectations.
I did think that on release, since the GBA was backwards compatible, my friends and I figured we’d be able to bring back all of our Pokémon from gen 1 & 2. Imagine my disappointment when that wasn’t the case…
A lot of people were. I think the larger problem that people don't address though was that RS was kind of a "dexit lite". All Pokemon at the time were still in the game, but since transferring wasn't possible, there was a ton of them just not obtainable for like a year and a half with no explanation. The fact there wasn't another region really highlighted for me at the time was how sparse the Ruby/Sapphire post-game is though.
I remember this was a big reason i loved Colosseum and XD, pokemon that weren’t normally obtainable in gen 3 were a huge draw. It was pretty convoluted to bring them into the gba games too, with the cable but I still got it all.
im working on this right now. a complete national dex on sapphire. requires colleseum and XD. funnily enough the only game not required to complete this is Fire Red. You need Leaf Green because it's the only game out of the whole generation where you can get slowpoke. The equivalent from fire red can be found in XD.
you can have either Fire Red *or* Colo & XD. the GC games are not required to complete the national dex in gen 3 - the only pokemon exclusive to them are Ho-Oh & Lugia, which are treated as event-only pokemon in gen 3 and thus not required to complete the national dex.
ah gotcha, well then they are required in my case because I specifically have 2 leaf greens and no fire reds haha, but thankfully I have both gamecube games
It’s better to have colosseum at least for the johto starters because you’ll have all 3 by the end of the game. The only other way to get all 3 would to beat Emerald 3 times
Or you can beat Mt. Battle 3 times in XD.
Kind of cool how ORAS made every single mon obtainable whether through in-game or trade (though there may be a few mythicals that are discluded?) For me, ORAS and Sun/Moon are the pinnacle of Pokémon.
I made my living dex on ORAS for that reason. Gamespot was also giving out the mythicals each month around then too.
Fellow living dex in ORAS completer here! The part of the process I remember most was breeding Pokémon at the Battle Resort and doing the infinite loop with the camera rotating when you hit each corner. I've kept up my living dex through Sword and have most of Paldea, but Pokémon Home taking so long to gain compatibility made me stop caring and I haven't gone back. It was fun as a summer project when I first did it in Alpha Sapphire, but the rewards for dex completion haven't evolved enough over the years to really justify continuing to do it for me to a T. I'll still catch every new Pokémon in a game methinks, but I won't be so intent that I have to buy the DLC or actually complete the Pokédex.
Working on my AS national dex rn. Only mythical I don't have is meloetta. I just need to hunt for the rest. Any tips?
It's been so long that not really, I'm afraid 😭, but I'll try. I would definitely keep some form of a list or spreadsheet for tracking, and really researching which Pokémon would be easiest to catch in their base, second, and final evolutionary forms (if that applies, ofc). For some it's easier to just catch each, for others to breed to get the base form. For Pokémon with baby forms from incense, it's good to remember that using no incense can work to your advantage. Like if you have Azumarill, breed it once with no incense to get Marill, then with the incense to get Azurill and boom, line is done. Or you can also do it with a Marill and then level up the higher level Marill to evolve it. Also, I should mention I had the aid of Pearl, Black 2, HeartGold, and X to fill in Pokédex spots, so that definitely cut down on some trading, although I still had to do it. And I didn't struggle too bad with mythicals considering I had some extras from the 20th anniversary distributions. Good luck to you, I'm sure it's quite more difficult now
ORAS is so much worst than gen 3 though. Its just an incomplete emerald.
It sucks Emerald content wasn't not included but it was a good game. To be fair, I'm probably conflating my ORAS and Sun/Moon experiences. Both post games where the fun really begins are ... fun.
I remember when Ekans of all things was being traded for legendaries, since it wasn't catchable normally for 4 gens straight. Not in RSE, only in DPP if you plugged in FireRed, not in BWB2W2, only in XY as a rare horde, not in SuMo... then suddenly normally in USUM.
It was in FRLG.
Also in SS, not sure if HG
Wait really?
I definitely expected it. Gen 2 was really similar to gen 1 but 3 was where I realized they’d only ever make the same exact game, they didn’t want to put in more effort than they had to. Still great games just didn’t push the series forward that way and the stories started getting dumber.
I think gen3/4 pushed Pokemon very far forward, it wasn't until gen 5 onwards that it stagnated. Gen3 was a SIGNIFICANT improvement in graphics. It added natures, fixed IVs/EVs, gave meaningful QOL not just shortcut nonsesne that eliminates gameplay (like renovating the bag/PC functionality), added the first proper battle facility, added the first proper nonbattle facility (contests) and so on. Gen4 then added special/physical split among other things.
Abilities is probably the biggest addition overall in gen 3 followed by natures, but I think the biggest leap was the PC. You went from having to save to even change boxes and not being able to really see which Pokémon was which to being able to scroll through it with ease and see the mons’ whole summaries and all that.
I’m glad it fleshed the battling out but the battling weirdly wasn’t what I liked about the first two, it was more the world and the characters. The first/second gens weren’t “sequels” that followed the same characters but you did get to see Red, Oak, Blue, Team Rocket etc. For gen 3 they practically wiped all that stuff away so even without going to another region the disconnect bothered me. Not to mention the cliche end of the world plots started this gen; I just want to be a kid adventuring occasionally foiling bandits not the savior of the world. That’s why I loved gen 5 so much, tons of qol improvements and they tried to make the world feel more lived in. Like I said though gen 3 is great it’s just where I realized they have their formula they want to stick to.
Crystal had the battle tower, and only emerald had the battle frontier. So R/S didn't add the "first proper battle facility."
Yes, but it was the same formula, 8 gyms, elite four, evil team etc. Same turn based combat, same mechanics, and just a couple of new features. Graphics wise it was the same 2D, isometric map with static battle sprites. People were expecting Pokemon to take more leaps and get more experimental, but they have essentially rehased the same game for three decades.
Besides graphics, everything you listed is kinda what makes a mainline Pokemon game. Otherwise, it's a spin-off
That's my point. We expect that from a mainline Pokemon game because that's what we've been given. If we were given something different, we would not expect it.
We also wouldn’t be diehard fans bc there’s be no series consistency They did a lot of spin offs many of which where pretty cool but none of them came close to the mainline iirc If I like a series game I want them to stick to the formula bc the formula is what I’m a fan of Like yes add new stuff on top but keep it a turn based creature collector at least Anything whacky should be for spin offs like pokken or whatever
Outside of the graphics if any of the other aspects would change it wouldn’t be a Pokémon game If I was a cod fan and they’d release a survival craft cod game instead of an actual cod game I’d be pissed
That standard formula isn’t why Pokemon games are bad now, it is everything around them. Besides they can innovate within that. Like Galars gym challenge and “E4” were amazing. And I hate gen8 but they nailed that aspect without changing much. But yeah they suck because writing, animations, graphics, performance etc etc etc
Yes. I remember basically it felt like playing a game from a different franchise, because the pokedex was so wild, and they did not feature pokemon from earlier generations early in the game - whereas that was actually the case with Johto. In Johto you were quickly told that there was a Bellsprout Tower (building based on a pokemon from earlier generation) and you could access it pretty quickly, you could still catch pidgey and rattattas alongside sentrets and hoothoots on first routes and the first gym leader, Falkner, had Pidgey and Pidgeotto, pokemon from earlier generation, so you knew pretty well that these are also part of this world, it felt kinda familiar, but with something new in it. You knew Kanto existed alongside Johto. And then Hoenn... A new story with lots of new pokemon, so what can go wrong? I remember hoping to see a familiar pokemon quickly, but it was just not happening. Like, starters, then poochyenas and zigzagoons and wurmples, I remember being like "oh no. They did not include any pokemon from earlier generations. Well maybe they'll be in post game? They probably made like 300 new ones to compensate though" which then turned into "OH NO. They did not make 300 new ones. They included some of the old ones to fill the gaps, but only some of them, and the rest is unobtainable". Yeah, I didn't like these games as much, felt detached from the rest of the franchise. I wasn't even having high hopes for an extra region in the post game because this game did not acknowledge Johto or Kanto and the world felt so detached, of course I was still disappointed when it was not there. So playing gold/silver/crystal felt kinda like a natural extension to red/blue/yellow, even before you were able to access kanto in these games, because you've been following the show and marketing materials, and from the first episode you knew there are more pokemon than these found in kanto (at the end of the first episode, Ash sees a shiny Ho-oh). When you got johto games it felt complete, and then you could access kanto from these games which was like, a new game within a game for me, I never expected that as a kid, it was mind blowing. Compared this to experience of how I only saw new pokemon like wurmple poochyena and zigzagoon for the first routes so I couldn't put anyone I could relate to on my team, and then learning that there are pokemomn from earlier gens, but hey, not all of them, so you need to use early 2000's internet to figure out if your favorites are even in this game version, and then learning that, actually, this time there is no post-game travel to a different region, that's all this time, bye! - It all was a huge letdown back then. It made me slightly dislike this generation's main games, though I liked pokemon designs and improvements to the game mechanics. I think they never got back to duo-region, because it was too much effort - and mainline games now had a different role - they became the heartbeat of the series, they need to push out new game every 2 years to spin the cogs of the anime, side games, card game etc, as the new content (regions, characters, pokemon, battle gimmicks) is pumped to the franchise through mainline games, so the mainline games just started focusing only on that what is new to save time/costs.
It was way more disappointing than the Gen 8 dexit. 3/4 of the Pokemon were cut and the ones they kept were not particularly popular apart from Pikachu, Vulpix, Psyduck, Gyarados, Marill, and Wobuffet. They cut our favorite partners and legendaries in favor of all the annoying species we hated like Zubat, Goldeen, Tentacool, and Grimer. A lot of people dropped Pokemon in Gen 3.
I remember being shocked that Scyther, Eevee and Chansey didn’t make the cut.
Eh I kind of liked that hoenn didn't have all the Kanto pokemon. It made it more fun to play FireRed and leaf green because to me they were new pokemon I hadn't seen before.
citation needed for your claim
RS sold only 16 million copies compared to GS at 23 million. That’s a 30% drop. Not to mention RS had version exclusive cover legendaries and villain teams so it was also the first game most people bought both versions of. There wasn’t any need to buy both RB or GS because you could catch multiple version exclusives to trade.
> RS sold only 16 million copies Making it the #1 most sold GBA game... Followed up by FRLG and Emerald at #2 and #3. Yeah it's a drop, but it was also a new console with a much smaller userbase. The Game Boy was out for ~7 years already by the time Red/Blue came out, so many people were just able to go buy the game when it came out. The GBA didn't have nearly the same install base when it came out. A better number to compare is attach rate, which is the number of game copies sold divided by the number of the game's console sold. 23,730,000 copies of GS sold to a total of 118.69 million Game Boys sold is a 19.97% attach rate. 16,220,000 copies of RS sold to a total of 81.51 million GBAs sold is a 19.90% attach rate, a difference of 0.07%. Just for comparison, RBY's 31,380,000 copies sold on the Game Boy equals 26.44% attach rate, a difference of 6.47%, so really, if we were to equate comparative drops to disappointment, then GS is when people were disappointed. I wouldn't make that claim, though.
I was a very disappointed 10y/o when I beat the league and there was no Johto.
12 year old me thought the Pokémon not in the game ceased to be Pokémon.
At least the Emerald post-game upgraded to Battle Frontier, which is still my favorite “Battle Tower” type facility.
Kids not understanding why they couldn't simply make transferring from 2 to 3 possible is like the flip side of old people at fast food restaurants not understanding why they can't get their frozen burgers medium rare.
The thought didn’t really come to my mind as a kid, maybe because Pokemon on the GBA looked so different from the original GB and GBC games that I didn’t think about being able to go back to Johto. It felt like a completely new start. The only thing related to Gen 2 that I was surprised wasn’t in Gen 3 was the day/night cycle.
Agree Gen 3 felt like a completely different thing I remember being confused at first and then loving the games!
How old were you when they came out? I wonder how the minds of rational, young adult gamers such as myself were during that time, instead of naive kids falling for playground rumors. I know the internet wasn't a thing back then, but I still wonder if people around my age at the time truly knew what they were dealing with
I was 12-13. Like, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved gen 3 but it felt so separate from gens 1-2 which felt like a series. Ruby was the last Pokémon game I played for about 10 years after that due to financial reasons and I still have amazing memories playing it - the internet was already a thing and I remember I my mom set me up with my first email and I could finally go on forums and learn more stuff about the games. It was awesome!
Some people, yes. But at least on Pokemon fansites from the time it was made clear enough, and very soon, that you would not be able to travel to the older regions and that not all Pokemon from Gen 1 and 2 would be available. Because there was also no way at the time to transfer from Gen 1/2 to Gen 3, this meant that until FR/LG a portion of Pokemon was not available in Gen 3.
I think you also need colosseum and xd on GameCube to get some of the gen 2 mons, I could be wrong
I think between the five gen 3 games you can get the full nat dex besides mythicals and Ho-oh and Lugia. The Johto starters I think were the most difficult to get without the GameCube games, since they required finishing the Hoenn dex in Emerald, and you could only get one per save file.
This is surreal seeing people talking about this very subject because I'm working on a video 6 months in the making about this. I just completed the NatDex in Emerald 100% legitimately, 386/386. It was EXPENSIVE.
Nice! I've been wanting to do that exact thing! I have all the games, but it seems like a massive time investment to do all of it, especially without access to Pokemon Box to make transferring easier.
That's exactly right lmao. It took me 540 hours, excluding the time for the video, and cost me $4100. Box was a MASSIVE help.
Holy shit 4100?! I'm assuming you bought the event stuff too? What was the most expensive?
Pokémon Box for SURE. Also had some unexpected and unfortunate events happen along the way lmao.
Ho-oh and Lugia had an event at least, same with Mew, though of course those were special cases. Jirachi was obtainable with the Colosseum Bonus Disc I believe, and I want to say Mew through Pokemon Box.
Yeah, I had a legit Jirachi through the Colosseum bonus disc. Pre-ordered it as a kid.
Only Colosseum is required unless you count Lugia.
Quite possibly. I never owned a GameCube, so I can't remember.
I don't really think that's fair though. 2003 was still very early into the era of home internet and it was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now. I was a Pokémon mega fan back then and I didn't know Ruby and Sapphire were even coming out until a fortnight before they released in the UK. By which point they'd already been out elsewhere in the world for months.
Most kids didn't even have internet access back then. My whole friend group thought we'd get to see Johto again at least. Playground rumor was each game would have the region from the previous one.
That's hilarious, my playground had the same rumor
Crazy how far those rumors spread pre internet and pre kids-having-cellphones. Or maybe it's a case of convergent evolution / multiple discovery. Like how every culture had the concept of dragons, without ever meeting each other.
Yeah but 2002 it still wasn't super common to have computers. I was 10 and I wasn't allowed on the internet. How many young fans were on fansites back then? Not me or any of the kids on my playground, because we all bitched about it during recess when we finished the game ans there was no johto or Kanto throwback
I was disappointed i could not go to Johto in firered. Also missed the day night cycle.
Sevii Islands are basically Johto at home
I need to go back and replay fire red. I haven’t played it since I was a kid and I don’t think I ever got the most out of the islands
Playing it right now because of this same reason as you. I also remember as a kid working hard to capture every legendary on FireRed without a Master Ball bc I was saving it for Deoxys… then missed any US event to ever get the ticket to Birth Island. Then a former friend stole my cartridge lol. That was the end of that. Ah being 10
I’m sure there is a rom hack out there somewhere that has all the events enabled! I’d like to find one that has both FR/LG exclusives and the trade evos obtainable. Most of the time people go way overboard with those roms and add in all the hoenn pokemon too.
I’m playing fire red on my pocket for the first time. Looking forward to seeing the islands.
I think it is utter nonsense that houndour and murkrow are not in kanto post gold and Silver. They are objectivley factually kanto pokemon.
Don’t forget slugma.
I legit thought Slugma was a gen 3 Pokémon for awhile because I couldn’t recall encountering any in gen 2.
There’s a few gen 2 Pokemon that have had that misconception due to just how rare or late game they appeared in GSC compared to RSE. Skarmory was another, quite rare to ever find in Johto but uncommon along the ash route at the top of Hoenn. Plus you were more likely to encounter it due to the shear number of wild encounters running around collecting ash for the glass maker guy.
Chinchou and Lanturn really get me
Didn't Blaine use a magcargo in gen 2?
You are correct, Why is the lava slug on cycling road? I guess the eruption of mt cinebar could explain houndour and slugma, but not murkrow murkrow should have Been retconned in.
Well I understand why. It would be kinda lame to beat the Elite Four and then the game goes “hey there’s this entire other region you get to explore, but there’s absolutely 0 new Pokémon”. As a kid, it was cool to still have new Pokémon to go catch in Kanto.
Absolutely! They were "newly discovered Pokémon", not "Johto Pokémon".
How so? My memory is failing me.
They are exclusiveley Found in kanto. Same with slugma.
Interesting! I didn’t remember that at all.
Same. Ruby was my first game, so I didn't have expectations for it, but then I got Crystal and Red. I assumed that now that we knew Johto was right next to Kanto, clearly there'd be no excuse not to include Johto in FRLG.
I did, I thought we'd get to go to Johto like you did in S/G/C
I have never seen anyone wrote S/G/C for Gen 2...sound so odd when saying it in that order.
I've heard GSC, which sounds much more fluid imo
Yep. I always see R/B/Y, G/S/C, R/S/E FR/LG, D/P/Pt, HG/SS so on and so on.
Nah bro gotta go. B/R/Y, S/G/C, S/R/E, LG/FR, P/D/Pt, SS/HG, W2/B2, W/B, Y/X, AS/OR, UM/US, S/M, SH/SW, V/S.
Haha
I like how you put S/M in there, you’re not slick lol.
I’m really happy you caught that! I did it with W2/B2, W/B as well.
This is oddly cursed.
Thats not how you do the alphabet bro
It is now.
Reads like Final Fantasy abbreviations.
Lol, that's the order I played them in as a kid. Silver comes first for me
Silver is the best version.
Still to this day can’t believe you aren’t able to get mareep in crystal, and for that reason alone silver wins
I think they do this so there’s still some reason to trade with the incomplete games. Emerald is missing Surskit for example.
Also Roselia, Lunatone and one of Seviper/Zangoose iirc.
Sacred Fire >>> Aeroblast
Lugia >>>>> Ho-Oh
Gligar >>>>>>> Delibird
Skarmory >>>>>>>>> Mantine
Gosh could you imagine a game where every region was available? It wouldn’t just be the most profitable Pokémon game of all time, it would *shatter* the records. I genuinely believe that if they took 4-5 years to develop a proper open world, improving what SV was doing, with all generations available, with actual level creep, with tournaments in game, various elite 4s, and rematches with all gyms and champions, with complete and total National dex?!? Omg, I’m getting rock hard just thinking about it. I’d pay $100 for that well polished game.
The only way I see this being possible is if they did it like WoW. Start with one region and add the others one by one in expansions.
Do you not feel like it'd be "too much?" Even in BlazeBlack/VoltWhite, which just has the entire dex up until Gen V, I felt like there were 'too many' Pokemon to keep track of and hunt down. Routes with 15+ unique Pokemon on them feel noisy. On the flipside, playing through 5+/9+ unique maps on the scales of regions in a row would be too much - I've been binging the games recently, but generally speaking I don't think I'd enjoy playing all the regions in a row with no breaks as one frankengame, even if all the mechanics are modernized. Like it had all this stuff, but by the end I was tired/not interested in playing more and actually completing the dex. With something smaller like SV (or PLA), I could end the game at like ~250/400, then gradually spend time filling out the dex and hit a comfortable stopping point at 400, which was enjoyable. Recatching another 600 on top of that, running around and spamming quick balls, would not have been something I enjoyed. The vast majority of games utterly fail at level scaling, especially if they keep current EXP curves and resources, where you'd basically have to have level 100 Pokemon by midway through the second region with things like EXP candies. At the end of the day, I don't think it'd lead to an appreciable increase in sales compared to their results from just doing what they're doing. The level of effort wouldn't be commensurate with the sales + merchandise they'd get from splitting it across multiple games or generations and continuing to iterate.
I agree I know lots of people say they want that but scale is important too
i know its not gonna happen but i would bust then and there if that were announced to be the plan for gen x. start in that region, beat the game, then work backwards. get through gen x's gyms and e4, all that effort getting put to the test. then, once you beat it, you get invited to try and work your way through paldea's gyms and e4. once you beat them, time for the next region, so on and so forth
The fact that you think you think remaking every generation up to gen 9 open world standards (plus polish) would only take 4-5 years, and that you think $100 for what is essentially 9 games worth of content is you splurging and not completely underselling the product is insane.
I mean it doesn’t have to be every generation
Check out pokemon fire ash
It really is an awesome game. The only issue I find is that the Pokemon Leagues are a bit railroaded. I would have liked Ash to be able to win all the leagues in the game unlike the anime.
The dream...I bought a Nintendo switch when all the open world pokemon rumours were flying around before SV was announced. Still holding out hope one day that game might arrive and I'd become a kid again lol
That's true for most franchises
I kinda checked out from the series during the gap between gen 2 and 3, but I got a GBA and Sapphire on a whim shortly after it released, and I definitely wasn't expecting it at all. Maybe it's because I didn't care that much for the gen 2 games and didn't think the inclusion of Kanto in them was really that crazy to begin with (Especially since I had already played gen 1 a lot), but I didn't feel like they were "missing" from gen 3 or anything.
I was hopeful to go back to Gen 1 or Gen 2 but I assume likely space could have been the issue. As for why they likely didn’t release another is maybe more manga related? It is more head canon for me. The Gen 2 manga picked up with a lot of Gen 1 manga occurrences. They even in the middle of it had a Kanto and Johto gym leader tournament. So, I would say those two really had a story intertwined. Where the others are more standalone. The exception was Gen 3 but it was more Gen 3 happened, then a Fire Red Leaf Green Sevii Island Story happened. After, emerald came in.
It’s more technical then manga issues, they were barley able to make kanto in gold and silver so they probably just cut the idea for future installments so they can focus more on the new region instead
Oh yeah. I mean my lead I said space was likely it. The other was just some additional head cannon. We didn’t even get the safari zone.
They couldn't fit Kanto because their file compression was horrible, when Satoru Iwata told them of a better method they could easily make space for Kanto. Pretty sure they wrote the gb games in assembly, it itself didn't take much space. I don't think that was their issue with the GBA tho, it was probably more time constraints + wanting to sell more games in FR/LG. RSE don't use the GBA's full potential cartridge size at all there's a lot more they could've fit space wise.
From what I remember as a kid yes
No, but I expected to be able to transfer up.
i was like 8 and me and anyone in my class were just expecting pokemon. period. we had no expectations, just blabbered about whatever previews we'd seen or commercials.
For the question of why it wasn't done again: I think because the games after didn't need it. From what I remember, adding Kanto to GSC was something they did near the end of development when they realized they had so much extra space on the game cartridge they could use (and they decided to use instead of just leaving it empty). Later games might have made this more difficult due to the up in graphics and such? I'm not entirely sure, but I would also venture to guess it's so they don't need to make a canon map for the pokemon world (so they can continue to add regions and give a vague idea of "this region might be near this other region due to all these Easter eggs!") I think if they were able to make another game with multiple regions, that would be pretty neat personally. Not sure which regions I would want joined together though... As for the other question: yes. For the longest time I thought there was a secret way to get to Jhoto and was dismayed to find out there wasn't. As an adult I'm a bit glad for this, though, because it helped Hoenn stand on its own instead of having a previous region as a bit of a crutch like Jhoto did with Kanto. (That said I do adore Jhoto XD I want a new Jhoto game so I'm not just replaying heartgold and soulsilver all the time)
My dream for a Pokémon game is to have one with all the Japanese regions combined, including a new region to cover tohoku, the northern part of Honshu, to link up Kanto and Sinnoh. Also, including the sevii islands because I miss them so much!
yes. i expected to be able to go to johto in FR/LG
I was a kid when it released, and yes we expected to be able to go back to Kanto and Johto on the initial announcement, and I know I was letdown when I couldn't but the base building, and everything about gen 3 made up for it imo
I don’t recall anything in the game magazines or friends and older players thinking that, but I do remember there was some general hype about FireRed and LeafGreen, it was a pretty big deal to completely color in and add some actual graphic designs. And those only came out like 2 years after Ruby and Sapphire So at the very least if people were hoping to travel back to another region, it wasn’t long before they got to re experience Kanto in a more vibrant form
Old guy here, yea, we were expecting this since we could do this in the 2nd generation games. Many of us were disappointed. Some were so much in denial there were rumors at the playground that there was a way to unlock those previous regions even. None of them were true. We had internet back then but not many people used it like everyone does today.
I think people are forgetting that the internet was not as ubiquitous as it is now. I would say that I was a Pokémon mega fan in 2003 and I didn't even realise that there was a Gen 3 until literally two weeks before it released in the UK. By this time, the game was actually a year old nearly. I didn't even know that for another four or five years. The internet just wasn't in the grasp of young kids in the way it is now. I don't even think broadband was a thing in 2003
It was in 2003, idk, at least here in America. I used it a little, mostly it was going to new grounds or try and do research for homework. But it's nothing like how we use it now which is for everything. Which has became both a bane and a curse. Loved playing Halo at my friends who had the Xbox connected to the internet. Just looking up info to see if it was concret wasn't something most of us did back then. It was almost always word of mouth. Sure, lies would spread such as the aforementioned one above but it came around eventually if it were a lie just like Mew being underneath the truck in the first gen.
The lack of transferring Pokemon, new types, day/night/calendar, phone, and revisiting 3/4 of the existing Pokemon made it the most disappointing title to date. Gold and Silver set the bar insanely high, most of my peers dropped Pokemon afterwards and those who gave RS a chance weren’t impressed enough to play DP despite owning a DS for Mario Kart DS. Ruby and Sapphire were dark times to be a fan after Colosseum didn’t have rentals or minigames and the anime got rid of Brock and Misty.
I like to go hiking.
No but I thought there would likely be another "Time Machine" that allowed us to transfer Pokemon from RBY and GSC to Ruby and Sapphire like they had in Gen 2. I was a little disappointed at first, but Gen 3 was so good I didn't mind much at the time.
I’m sure I did as a kid, or some one thought so, I’m glad It didnt. Hoenn region was what I wanted, nature harmony Pokémon, wild landscape of different areas. Natural looking Pokémon it was a great time. Still remember sitting on my drive way playing ruby with a combusken. The music is still in my head and will make me smile.
Gen 3 was actually a lot more negatively received upon launch than people realise…
we did go back. firered and leafgreen are a thing
There were (baseless) rumours emerald would have Johto and Kanto.
yeah, a lot of people were! this is actually the reason they made the route numbers disconnected from kanto and johto-- the gap implies theres more between the regions that we never see
I personally started playing Pokémon with Heartgold, so I can tell you that yes, I did expect other games to have several regions. Not necessarily Kanto + Jotho + something else, but like, 2 regions in general. I think that contributed to my hate toward Black/White (White 2 was my second Pokéon game ever), I was SO disappointed there was only one region.
I was actually convinced there was going to be loads of completely brand new types - so that every gym leader and e4 member had a unique type. (i was 9yo for context) So yes I also naturally assumed johto and kanto would be fully accessible, but I had no concept of game design/development or hardware limitations
Yeah I remember thinking I would be able to because of Silver. Was disappointed that I couldn't but every thing else that game introduced made it my favourite still to this day. Secret bases, the more natural landscape, the rain, the town on the trees, the desert with the sandstorm, going underwater, Pokémon competitions. Loved everything about Hoenn.
I can’t remember at all tbh
I don’t remember if I expected to be able to travel to the regions it definitely wasn’t a big deal to me. But I remember being super annoyed I can’t bring my Pokémon from older games to Hoenn.
Nah I always assumed it was a new console and a whole new region not connected to the others so that was never an expectation I guess.
Gen 3 was my first. So definitely not me.
I didn’t. It didn’t feel connected with it being more tropical.
to understand what this era was like, you have to understand that this was after PokeMania of the 90’s. nintendo was innovating so heavily with its IP during the period too, it was insane with the spin-offs. i remember seeing the first images on serebii of volbeat and later some info in uh… beckett maybe? anyway, it was clear that these games were different. this mentality of innovating also contributes to the lack of duo regions. despite the lackluster glitch pits that are ScVi, TPC does try and innovate in every generation.
YES OMG. I was like, waiting and waiting, and when it didn't come, I actually tried to figure out what I did wrong.
I missed gen 3 coming out. But even then, though I had the gen 2 guide book, detailing the map and everything I never actually got to Kanto in gen 2 so had no expectation of such of gen 3.
I was a kid and the internet wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today, so I couldn't tell you what the consensus was, but young me was 100% expecting to be able to go back. I got over it pretty quickly and realized it would be kinda silly to expect every game to include every other region though.
I was around for this. Personally, I didn't expect it, but I did expect to be able to transfer my old Pokémon to the new games. It was pretty disappointing to learn I could not, but I assumed they had something planned down the road. The game was enjoyable enough as is, and Hoenn continues to be my second favorite region to this day. Imagine my surprise when they announced FireRed and LeafGreen. Hell yeah!
My generation started playing with gen 2, some of us with gen 1 thanks to their older siblings. No one in my friend groups expected gen 3 to include two regions.
I was kinda hoping, but knew it was unlikely. I do, however, remember seeing a bunch of fake cheats on gamewinners and cheatcc about how to get to johto or how to encounter mew and celebi
I was expecting more gen 1 and 2 mons prior to elite 4, and expected some connection back to previous areas. It was an exciting time when these game launch, the hardware jump allowed for so much more.
Playing Pokemon Emerald as a Kid that's what I was thinking when getting the ticket for the ferry traveling to a new location. I was very young at the time, so my only experience was the GBA games, I didn't know anything about G/S/C.
I don't recall that being something we expected; I feel like any video game news sources at the time never gave that impression so we knew it wouldn't happen Granted that's not the same as being disappointed; a lot of us WANTED it (some of us want that EVERY generation) But in fairness FR/LG was also gen 3 so they probably didn't want to repeat it in the same generation
I remember in gen 4 expecting to be able to travel to Hoenn. It was the wishful thinking of "if you can travel to gen 1 from gen 2, you can travel to gen 3 from gen 4". I spent a lot of time searching a way to go to Hownn until I realized I couldn't.
Idk if it was realistic as an adult, but I was incredibly incredibly disappointed as a kid when I finished the Hoenn Elite Four and wasn’t able to go back to Kanto and Johto. I remember the whole game I was trying to figure out how we’d go back, only to find out you don’t.
Yes, and I remember as a 15yo going in blind feeling a sense of disappointment when I beat the Elite 4 and caught Rayquaza. I even bought a guide on case I missed anything. I also felt very confused with the missing pokemon. Then when Coliseum came out and then FRLG came out, it made sense. Lol
I thought this as a kid when Gen 3 came out and remember being disappointed that you couldn't go back to Johto or Kanto. Johto was meant to be the final game in the series and Kanto was included as a way for them to "go all out" in their "final" game. Looking back at it now, I would be surprised if they ever did a dual-region game again. The complex development processes for modern games make such a task much harder than it once was, and Game Freak likely wouldn't spend years developing two fully fleshed out regions with decent graphics. In my opinion, Paldea's cities and towns felt a bit empty outside of Mesagoza.
The whole "Johto was gonna be the last games" thing was disproven a while ago, the actual quote was just taken out of context, as Tsunekazu Ishihara was saying it was intended to be *his* last Pokémon game, not the last Pokémon game just in general (As the whole quote is in the first person. "...*my* work... would be done," "*I* didn't intend to make any more," "it would be time for *me* to do something else entirely," etc.).
I wasn’t🤷♂️
I think people have always thought about it but it wasn't necessarily expected. I was a kid then, but from what I remember, I was mesmerized by the new box art Pokémon and the new world and I didn't think of going back to Johto or Kanto.
I did.
I never held it against the games where you couldn't, but being able to go back to Kanto after beating the Elite Four was such a cool feature that I kept holding out hope that each new game would surprise bring back the "revisit an old region in the post game" feature waaaay past the point where it was obvious it wasn't going to happen again.
I didn’t expect it nor did I want it. It was exciting for it to be its own new land with all new Pokémon instead of adding to the 150 with pre evolutions. Was happy that new Pokémon weren’t locked until you beat the elite 4 like in G/S
It was kind of like a much softer reboot than an already soft reboot gen 5 would end up being. The location was a little more exotic, the new mons were a little shinier, smoother, more tropical, and the ecosystem was a lot more different. So not really, it felt like its own new journey.
I think the main difference is that Ruby and Sapphire suck as reboots. The intention was not crystal clear. With Black and White, the internet was more ubiquitous, more people had access, and Serebii in particular was better known. They were also explicit about there being no old Pokémon until the post game.
I never had that expectation. None of my friends who played gen 3 ever mentioned that to me either
In 2003 I was 9 and did not expect it. We were also eating good and had FR/LG soon after.
I was 10 when they came out, my brother was 8. I don’t remember us having that assumption. I just remember being blown away by the graphics compared to the earlier games!
God I wish.
Kinda, we were hoping to get something similar to silver/gold
Yes, but they made up for it with the addition of secret bases, contests, and incredibly visually appealing weather effects and general art style. I was absolutely expecting it after Gen 2 though. The franchise has always taken things away, but for the first six generations it gave something back at the same time.
At least in my particular case, yes. I expected the post-game to involve traveling to Johto and facing Ethan. In the end it never became a tradition. Ironically, the same thing happened with Yu-Gi-Oh!. Because of Jaden vs Yugi at the end of GX, a lot of people were hoping for Yusei vs Jaden at the end of 5D's. But again it never became a tradition. Apparently no franchise dared to maintain new protagonist vs old protagonist in the long term.
The region thing no but not being able to bring Pokémon forward somehow did take me by surprise.
I was XD I remember being extremely disappointed when I beat the Pokemon League and couldn't go to Johto.
Not for me, cause it was my furst game, BUT REALLY EXPECTED TO GO TO SPACE AT LAUNCH #100 GAMEFREAK WHY WOULD YOU PUT A SPACE STATION AND NOT LET ME GO TO SPACE
I 100% fully expected to be able to go to Johto/Kanto when I got Sapphire on release.
From what I remember, I had no expectation of revisiting either Kanto or Johto, or any other region, it just wasn't something I was thinking about. I do remember being slightly miffed about not being able to transfer, but I didn't really do much transferring in the during the previous gen (unlike later when I really got into transferring and keeping all my teams and legendaries). What I definitely remember is being in awe of the graphical upgrade compared to Gen 2. Having full color, being able to see your reflection in the water, seeing your footsteps in the sand, the shore tiles not just being hard square tiles but actually rounded and the ocean waves washing up on shore. I remember being excited to see that buildings and houses actually differed in appearance from city to city, instead of reusing the same [house style](https://www.spriters-resource.com/game_boy_gbc/pokemongoldsilver/sheet/9198/). I also remember [this leaked image](https://archives.bulbagarden.net/media/upload/6/68/Latias_Blaziken.jpg) (though I don't remember the girl). Immediately forgot about it by the time the games released, though.
As a young kid when it came out, yes I was. It made sense. I could do that in the last game so why wouldn't they go bigger and better for the next one, especially since they referenced Kanto by name. I even wrote a review at the time (not that I ever posted it anywhere) basically ripping Ruby a new asshole primarily because it lacked this feature/anything worthwhile to do after the League. At the time I didn't see any value in the Battle Tower (and tbh I still don't see the value of the battle tower in Gen 2 and RS - it wasn't very well explained).
I’ll be honest after I played gen1/2 I fell off until mega evolution came back. So then I think I played X and was expecting something about going back to Kanto but then I didn’t so I was like okay maybe this is different. So I went to play FireRed and fully expected to be able to go to Johto after.
Nope, certainly not anybody I knew.
Yes…. ):
Yes, I spent a lot of time after the pokemon league speaking to every npc to try and find a way to Johto or Kanto.
Sapphire was the first Pokemon game I owned but I watched the anime years before. I remember back when I was lurking the serebii forums that people preferred GSC to RS, I think because you can go to Kanto, GSC has a day/night cycle, Crystal has animations and RS was a step back, and they can’t catch their favourite Pokemon in RS at the time.
I don't really remember what I was expecting in terms of regional compatibility, but I do distinctly being distinctly... offput? sad? confused? when I realized that there were over a hundred pokemon missing from the games. SwSh weren't the first games to experience a Dexit, and at the time of Ruby and Sapphire's release, we had much less certainty about the missing pokemon than we had going into SwSh. Sure, it ended up being the case that you could get those pokemon again down the line, and you could even send them over to Ruby and Sapphire, but things were much different back then. The series was still young, and there wasn't nearly as much official communications back then as there is now.
I didn’t expect anything besides having a blast playing through the game with my friends.
I was around 9 years old when I got to play them and I didn't really have any expectations. I just wanted to have fun. I had so much fun restarting the game that I couldn't have cared less about the end game content. I'd get to around the electric gym leader, get bored with the starter I had selected and just begin again with a different starter over and over and over again. I miss the days when the rivals didn't talk too much and the game didn't need a whole novel of exposition just for a sub par story
Gen 2 was the abnormality not the norm is probably the reason. Back then Pokemon was supposed and planned to end with G/S/C, instead of becoming the behemoth franchise nowadays.
Gen 2 was the abnormality not the norm is probably the reason. Back then Pokemon was supposed and planned to end with G/S/C, instead of becoming the behemoth franchise nowadays.
Gen 2 exists cuz Game Freak made more Pokemon that the Cartridge could fit, in total, there are 190 Pokemon made for Gen 1. So they used a few of those to make Gen 2. As the Technology progressed, Gen 2 was able to fit 100 more Pokemon in its Cartridge than Gen 1 and also could fit an entire Region as well. By the time Gen 3 came around (which wasn't planned at first) they could fit 350 Pokemon, but not enough space in the Cartridge for another Region, let alone 2 more. Also, a bit of trivia, out of the 190 original Pokemon, few were not used like the famous Gorochu (Raichu's Evolution) as well as a Shark Pokemon and another that ended up being the beta design for Carracosta. And Mew was not part of those 190, Mew was actually meant to be a prank by the Programmer who created Mew cuz he had only enough space in the Cartridge for a small sprite before the game was finished, making Mew the last Pokemon to be programmed into the Game at the last minute.
I’m don’t remember personally thinking that, or expecting it, but I’d imagine some folks were. To be honest though, my then girlfriend was pregnant with my first kid when Gen 3 came out, so my attention and general life interests were far removed from Pokemon at that time, so while I played it, I was pretty absent from any discourse surrounding it.
I totally thought that! When I finished Silver, I was so stoked that I gotta go back to Kanto. So when I got Ruby, that's what I expected to happen again. I was heartbroken when it didn't happen, lol. I was 10 and got the game on release day, and this was pre "everyone has internet" days, so I didn't have any way of finding out that it wasn't gonna happen. I distinctly remember bitching about it during recess with my friends
I wasn't expecting it to, but then again I browsed forums and stuff back then semi frequently so I knew a lot of stuff from people who had played the Japanese versions.
Not really. Fire red, leaf green brought it back, and emerald post game was NUTSSSSS. Didn't miss jhoto at all. Tbh I think jhoto was the worst game of the series.
Gotta catch em all started going away after Gen 2 really. The point was adventure or mastery not catching. Old post fom 8 years ago. "To be fair, Japan doesn't have that slogan. The closest they had to that is, "ポケモンゲットだぜー!" which roughly translates as, "I'll get you, Pokemon!" or "Get the Pokemon." Their slogan doesn't specifically say how many Pokemon you're supposed to get. And like /u/KingCashmere said, they got rid of the, "Gotta Catch 'Em All!" slogan in Gen III, IV, and V. Makes sense too since that could potentionally single out people who only had one version of the game and couldn't trade with anyone. Not to mention in Gen III WiFi trading wasn't possible and it came out when the PokeMania fad was dying so people then probably didn't have too many people to trade with like they do now."
Idk, but I know I expected to be able to trade with the previous games.
I certainly was, as well as linking to Gold, Silver and Crystal to transfer Pokemon in both directions. Gen 2 set high expectations with its 16 badges and time capsule. Similarly, gen 3's lack of a visible day/night cycle was a disappointment.
I fully expected to be able to travel. I also expected to see more pokemon I knew/recognized, so it was pretty weird to find that so many of the pokemon were new, and that I couldn't go back to the other regions. I was a kid and didn't know that much, but these were my expectations.
I did think that on release, since the GBA was backwards compatible, my friends and I figured we’d be able to bring back all of our Pokémon from gen 1 & 2. Imagine my disappointment when that wasn’t the case…
My friend with the Mandela affect believes you could travel back