In a craven attempt to capture that sweet, sweet microtransaction cash, Nintendo stopped caring about the quality of their flagship product and started focusing on the soulless, smooth-bodied 3D renderings of our favorite monster pals. And each of these entries came with tons of new, interesting Pokémon to discover and quality-of-life improvements all the way through the fifth generation’s pair, Pokémon Black and White (2010).īut that progress was undone only two years later, starting with the release of mobile game cash cow Pokémon Go.
The third generation, made up of Ruby and Sapphire (2003), gave us weather conditions (which thankfully weren’t dependent on the same kind of real-time hardware as their predecessors).
The second generation (2000) introduced a real-time clock that affected gameplay (something Nintendo hadn’t actually fully figured out, and which has since been rendered unusable due to long-dead batteries within the original Game Boy cartridges’ plastic shells) and new types of Poké Balls.
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN POKEMON OMEGA RUBY AND ALPHA SAPPHIRE FULL
After the series’ exciting-but-imperfect debut on the Game Boy in 1998, which featured a vibrant world full of playful new monster friends but still quite a few gameplay kinks to work out, each subsequent pair of entries-or generation as fans know them-began to shine, stuffed full of love, care, and with an abundance of content. In its prime, Pokémon was a thing of intricate beauty.