Pokémon Gold & Silver

I grew up in Johto.

two of the absolute best sequels ever made, and the only true sequels in the Pokemon franchise. everything else is a soft reboot, but Gold and Silver expand upon Red and Blue whilst also commenting on their place in the Pokemon canon. they were meant to be the final games in the series, and it shows: the Kanto region, and the final battle in particular, have an MGS2-esque postmodern feel to them. these deserve more than 500 characters. brilliant.

Lovable, very hard for me as a kid, but still, catchy sound and fun game.

Mareeeep ftw

The games themselves are good. Better than the red, blue & yellow Pokemon games as there is a lot of adventures to do in this. Catch Pokemon in this, put it in the N64 transfer pak to have your Pokemon vs a friends Pokemon to battle in Pokemon Stadium 2 for N64.

Crystal's better.

The peak of Pokemon games. Everything is refined as it needs to be and there aren't so many Pokemon now that it becomes cumbersome to remember them all. There is also a strange nostalgia in returning to Kanto only to find it pretty absent of meaningful content or challenge.

Gold and Silver takes everything that was great about the original games and literally doubles it. Which is really the only thing that was needed to make the perfect set of sequels. All the new Pokemon are whimsical and fun. The new areas are just fine. The battles are great aside from Whitney and provide a suitable challenge for old and new gamers alike.

The perfect sequel. Red/Blue were perfect and Gold/Silver just took everything to another level that no other Pokemon game has met since. Better story, more to do and more to collect! Totodile

This felt like a high point to me, where Pokemon shored up its shortcomings and offered us a great follow-up series to its acclaimed Red/Blue/Green.

Best generation. Kanto AND Johto in this.

Pokemon at its best. It's not overloaded, it's not overly simplistic. It's perfect. I owned both copies and adored them so much that I beat them and captured both legendary Pokemon. Something about this issue in the franchise is lightning in a bottle.

Stopped playing after this one but it's still good especially because you can do Kanto at the end too. Don't remember any of the Pokemon though.

Cannot name a single new Pokemon after the original 150 because they're all stupid and terrible and this is the one where you get to set the time and drop everything because it's the evening and this bullshit pokemon only shows up when the moon is full etc

I enjoy the Pokemon formula very much but I have to say I never finished either of these ones - I think the hundreds of hours I put into Red/Blue kind of burned me out haha.