I don’t have anything to back this up but it feels like a lot of people left the franchise at gen 5 including myself. The BW anime is also really unpopular with fans.
i liked it more than pokemon diamond, but both felt like a step down from the world of 3 >but platinum
why the frick would i even want to go back after a shit slog of a first impression
gen 5 probably, frickton of ugly designs and it was the point where series was the most stagnated so no one gave a frick about the franchise except hardcore fans who buy every game and children.
The series lost more people from Gen 1 to 2 and from Gen 2 to 3, than from 4 to 5 anons. The death of pokémania in the west was unironically the lowest the series was in popularity, as the massive normie interest withered away to nothing, leaving hte invested and the children to continue. Engagement stayed high in Japan, but that's because everyone accepted it for what it was/didn't shit on it for being kiddy-focused, like in the days of PS2 and Xbox in america.
>The death of pokémania in the west was unironically the lowest the series was in popularity, as the massive normie interest withered away to nothing, leaving hte invested and the children to continue. Engagement stayed high in Japan
I wanted to see if this was really true so I just spent the past couple of minutes making this
GAME: Total sales (Japan sales | Overseas sales) [Overseas sales per Japanese sale]
It’s insane that we’re in 2022 and 99% of morons still reflexively screech “gen 5” without ever taking notice of the massive sales drops that happened between gens 1-3. This board is truly braindead.
First Pokemania ended during 2000 which proves with a chart but a second coming happened when DS was revolutionary thanks to new gimmicks with online functional.
I would hardly call the DS generation a second pokemania, gen 4 and gen 5 didn't sell that much better compared to 3. Second pokemania was pokemon go at launch
Anecdotally, my friend group also went through their "Pokémon is for babies" phase around the end of Gen 4 and picked the series back up again around Gen 7 (though some were a bit earlier/later than that) I stuck with it though, and Gen 5 is still my personal favorite overall
I dropped the series when I was a teen and saw gen 5's early designs, you're greeted in a generation by the ugliest route 1 shitmons to this day, and there is nothing from the previous gens to fall back on, and even the starters were pretty bad, and I hated the monkeys.
Gen 5 has some mons I love, but they were too late in the game for me to even see them back then.
>you're greeted in a generation by the ugliest route 1 shitmons to this day
What's funny is I thought this about SV. But then the leaks showed some cool designs so I'm more interested. TPC needs to work on their marketing.
Yeah, same for me honestly, of the designs they revealed, I only really liked ceruledge, which wasn't even in scarlet, but actually playing the game I found plenty of stuff I liked
yeah i kind of fell out of the series before gen 5 too and came back for gen 7
for some reason i didnt like vidya as much when i was in high school but picked it up again in college
Was it due to everyone disliking Gen 5 or was it because Gen 4's slower gameplay and overhauled phys/special split made people skip Gen 5? I love the split but I can imagine a normie not being as succesful running the same movesets as always on their favs could've caused some friction
No it was because too many Gen V Pokemon look moronic and the premise of the story was dumb as well >villain convinces a world entirely based on human-Pokemon interaction that this is bad
The split is why I just can’t bring myself to replay Gen 1-3 anymore. The fact stuff like shadow ball still lowers special def despite being physical is so pants on head moronic.
Problem was that a lot of the original poke fans were now teens or adults by gen 5 so it sorta was stuck in a gen gap.
But now many of that gen have children and there's the whole pokemon go phenomena that obviously stimulated it a bit since.
So now it's apparently peaking again.
Ditto here,I couldn't wait for gen 4, played it on nosgba, loved heart gold too, then platinum. The connection to previous gens was important. But the slow gameplay loop, new pokemon being weird, and me being ~18 at the time, games like red dead 1,gta V coming out soon etc, I didn't really care,but now, after gen 6 (3 remasters), gen 7 which I liked, transition to switch which is questionable but still in progress, I seem to love it again, being almost 30. Let's me escape this world well.
This is the correct answer, and this is coming from an unovagay. When gen 5 came out most of the people who had been playing up to that point had become teens and entered their "haha pokemon is for kids, you still play that??" phase, I only ever saw it being talked about on Tumblr and nowhere else. But then the 3DS was such a big thing that when XY got announced (specially being the first 3D game and all) and with those teens having grown up, it's like everyone came back at once and it became cool again, this time for good.
Gen 5 came out 15 years after the franchise's debut, most of the people that had started with gen 1 had grown OUT of their "haha Pokemon is for babies" at that point.
Yeah, Gen 5 happened to come out right around the time where I was moving on. It was also one of the last video games I asked for instead of bought myself which probably had a lot to do with why I didn't like it, there was a certain degree of shame attached with asking for a Pokemon game at that age. I distinctly remember asking for it in a "heh, Pokemon, huh... I GUESS I'll give it a shot" kind of way. I was a real homosexual in my mid -teens.
I dropped off at Gen 5 too. I was hyped for BW like I hadn't been for a new game in a long time, but when I actually got White and played it I wasn't satisfied with it and never bothered to pick up the sequel.
I wish I had, because BW2 is decent, but I didn't come back until ORAS
I fricking loved BW when it came out personally, but I have to admit the start of Gen 5 was when people at school just stopped caring. There were 1 or 2 guys maybe that were still into Pokemon, but they pretended they weren't into it because they were afraid of being judged.
>one of the, if not the best selling entry in the franchise
>when most people left
Everyone knows Too Much Water was when most people left. That was when most kids became tweens/teens and wanted to disassociate with kiddy things like Pokemon.
Yet it has comparable sales as gen 3-7. Gen 2 however saw the biggest drop in sales from one gen to the next and gen1-3 is the steepest drop in sales ever seen in the franchise. You’re either moronic or letting your gen 5 hate blind you to the fact it was gens 2 and 3 that “killed” pokemon if it ever happened
This, I vividly remember this was the point where me and my friends started thinking pokemon was a cringe game for toddlers and I did my best to distance myself from the franchise, oddly enough Gen 5 seems to be one of the most loved generations nowadays, I'm personally a huge fan of BW2, that's my favorite pokemon game.
I remember gen 5 being so hated by normies and the only thing they hated was the pokemo designs of that generation. I feel with the more recent gens normies don't hate the new designs as much even if they are worse.
BW was also leaked and fan translated about eight months before the game actually came out. I remember replaying it for the first time in the official version and hating the EN names.
By then the DS was old and there was mass produced affordable flash carts so it was extremely easy to pirate games and Gen 5 came to Japan like more than half a year before the World and the game was fan translated long before it was officially released. This was the reason going forward Pokémon went for Global Releases and even then games can leak but a week or so is not as bad as months.
>By then the DS was old and there was mass produced affordable flash carts so it was extremely easy to pirate games and Gen 5 came to Japan like more than half a year before the World and the game was fan translated long before it was officially released
I think the same could be said for hgss also i got that game like 5 months early when i was younger a bunch of people i knew had flashcarts i had had and r4 for a couple years at that point. Did bw even sell bad? i jsut looked at the numbers and it was the same as dp
Gen 3. Pokemon was seen as something "uncool." It was last year's fad, and generally associated with young children. People who played Gens 1 and 2 in middle school had to keep quiet about still playing Pokemon in high school.
Gen 5 came at the height of the DS and was part of the Pokemon Renaissance that lead to /vp/ being created.
Maybe B2W2, but BW was the big reason when "genwunners" started to be a thing, as many people were turned off by not being able to see any of their favorites until post game.
Gen 3. Yugioh became the new hotness by then and people were getting tired of Pokemon.
Gen 5 came out at the end of the DS' run and part of the surprise that it was even released came from the fact that everyone thought it would be a 3DS launch, not another DS game.
Evidently, both games came out at weird times, while trying to actually change the same boring formula.
said, people didn't give a shit about B2W2 until years later because it was practically a 3DS game before people even bought them.
gen 5 probably, frickton of ugly designs and it was the point where series was the most stagnated so no one gave a frick about the franchise except hardcore fans who buy every game and children.
Gen 3 is one of the lowest selling generations in the entire series. A lot of kids who were around for Pokemania were getting older and wanted to distance themselves from it to look cooler. Edgy, brown and bloom was starting to get popular.
I was a closet Pokémon fan in my teens. Like I stop Pokémon for a couple of years but then I saw Pokémon Ruby for cheap and bought it and started liking Pokémon again but I could not be seen with it cause I wanted to be hip and cool yo. This was before being geek was trendy and where if they saw you playing kids games you were made fun of.
>Also who the frick ever had a GBA?
80 million peple did apparently. And thanks to backwards compatibility with the GB and GBC it was also easilly the best console of the GameBoy line.
>The games still having ugly ass sprites not protected by novelty didn't help.
Anon, 16/32-bit graphics have probably aged better than any other graphical style. There's a reason the Gen 3 modding community is by far the largest and its not even close. Its because simple 2D cartoon artstyles still hold up to this day. The Gen 3 games aged far better than any gen before or since from a graphics standpoint.
Gen 3 is one of the lowest selling generations in the entire series. A lot of kids who were around for Pokemania were getting older and wanted to distance themselves from it to look cooler. Edgy, brown and bloom was starting to get popular.
It's like third-lowest all-time and sold 10m more than BW. Gen 3 actually enshrined the average Pokémon audience figures when the series left the world's most popular handheld gaming unit (average total sales for paired new Gen games between Gen 3 and 7 was 16.47m, RS sold 16.22m). The extras above that average, RGB's 31m, SS's 25.37, GS's 23m, THEY'RE the outliers, or rather - they're the total sales when normies, legit actual normies buy into a popular game on a popular system.
The thing you kids forget is most of who you see leave get replaced that same Gen by fresh blood and while a loss of about 2m is big, it's in no way comparable to the 8 and 7 million they lost jumping from Gen 1 to Gen 2 or from 2 to 3.
When Pokemania ended, only very young children still cared about Pokemon, so anyone that was still interested in it was an easy target for bullying. Thus, for any that weren't totally autistic, they began to despise Pokemon because they now associated it with getting bullied by their peers.
Gen 3. Gen 5 was also very unpopular but by then people stopped giving a shit if other people played pokemon.
Pokemania had pretty much died down by then, and around that time, many other companies were trying to capture the "western" audience with edgier games (see Shadow the Hedgehog) and so by comparison pokemon was seen as shit for babies.
I got that game late as a kid so I suspect they didn't market it in store or something as well as gen 1/2 because my parents didn't see it until I pestered them about it.
Then again, I didn't pester them earlier so maybe the marketing failed to even get to me.
Back then it was TV ads, advertisement posters, merch and the anime that marketed pokemon games.
Nowadays the marketing is totally different. I don't see any posters for pokemon anymore and the show is probably the only thing remaining from that generation of marketing.
The rest must be viral and the way people see others interact with pokemon - i.e. pokemon go and portable games played in public.
Then there's the console - gen 4 succeeded because the DS was hot shit back in the day.
The gen 3 anime was a massive step up from the gen 2 one, the problem was more than the gen 2 one being so shitty led to way too many fans just dropping the anime permanently.
They didn't give you the opportunity to import any old pokemon, they added stupid trading restriction so you can't get certain pokemon until you finish the majority of the game.
Ruby and Sapphire was mostly new pokemon old fans didn't like. Catching them all required a significant amount of hardware since many players dropped off. etc
Anon gen 3 games combined still sold over 20M units sure it might not have been as much as red and blue but it was still pretty big. I'm a gen 3 zoomer and I can say almost every kid was playing or knew about pokemon back in my elementary days and I'm from a poorgay country where nintendo was really unpopular and barelly bothered advertsing here.
the IGN boards(lol) andGanker literally were my only outlet to discuss about pokemon. every kid I knew lost interest in pokemon once ruby and sapphire came out.
It's gen 5. The anime was a disaster, BW was hated by genwunners and seen by most as a downgrade after HGSS, and BW2 released after the 3DS was already out and people already were excited for a 3D gen 6.
Liking Pokemon during Gen 3-6 was social suicide in the west until ecelebs and Pokemon Go made it acceptable to like the franchise again to normies.
Gen 5 sucked on a global scale tho.
Liking Pokemon during Gen 3-6 was social suicide in the west until ecelebs and Pokemon Go made it acceptable to like the franchise again to normies.
Gen 5 sucked on a global scale tho.
100000% gen 5. The sales alone attest to that. Shit gen 5 almost made me quit, gen 6 was able to bring me back though and I'm glad it did since gen 7 was fricking incredible.
My personal experience was Gen 3. That was when people around me stopped playing, made fun of each other for playing & I didn't see nearly as much hype in general surrounding the franchise. It had "died down" and most of us were in high school by that point.
DS did bring back interest for some, due to the online, but I didn't see a true resurgence until HGSS for the Pokewalker. Everyone was hyped about that.
After that I just straight up didn't see normies talk about it again in general until GO happened.
When Logan Paul and a bunch of Mainstream trashcan people decided pokemon cards are the new bitcoin and made idiots put GPS trackers on distributor trucks and even shoot people in Target parking lots over boxes of pokemon cards.
I wish i didn't sell all my pokemon shit when i was like 13/14 i was like im gonna stop playing pokemon im growing up sold all of my stuff at car boot sales. was playing watching the bw anime a few months later and playing pokemon again within a year kek
6 as a personal experience answer; it was the most puddle-thin shit generation to date, even SwShit got decent so-I-hear DLC at least
Basically lived and died by a wildly varying in quality array of (mostly) Gen. 1 pander Megas, stupid overpowered freebie mons in an already too easy series
3DS was just less successful and prolific of a console than the DS before it, and I no lie never encountered a soul playing Pokémon in public during those few years of Gen. 6
I remember being excited at the on-paper idea of Pokémon going 3D but upon seeing the first brief glimpse of gameplay, I immediately lost all interest in getting any of that generation of games; it was that ugly and off-putting, to me anyway
…
But objectively, I guess it was Black & White
But I will say, when they came out those were actually really popular with kids around me as well as myself, so I don’t think the sales are everything at the individual level
Like I said, I’d never had so little exposure to people playing Pokémon in public than during X/Y and ORAS: even younger kids at Summer camps or friends’ younger siblings, never saw it
I figure part of it was that the 3DS was more costly compared to its predecessors, and a lot of people thought the 3D was gimmicky (it was); I think just less kids owned 3DSes
But yeah that’s my “frick Gen. 6” input, but ig it was objectively B/W (but in spite of that, those were the height of the sprite-based era, polished to a mirror shine so W)
>stills in a game with animated sprites >just that, no acknowledgment of the overworld
Feels sorta like “screenshot a show’s smear frames; say animation looks bad” energy.
>thinks Gen 6 is bad; proceeds to wiener suck Gen 5 despite it being objectively worse in almost every regard >cries about gen 1 pandering
>stills in a game with animated sprites >just that, no acknowledgment of the overworld
Feels sorta like “screenshot a show’s smear frames; say animation looks bad” energy.
>mentions "smear frames" even though he blatantly doesn't know what smear frames are to pretend to know what he's talking about and defend objectively poorly made sprites
you can smell the unovahomosexualry coming off these posts. This guy was probably a fricking 8 year old when BW released.
>Between gens 3 and 5. Ironic since it was the golden age of the series.
well that might explain a few things.
I have to agree with this statement. The anime fatigue was there and lost its charm. Gamefreak was smart enough to follow the same formula with their game without changing too much just so they can survive for a few years. Compare to Digimon, arguably its only good competitor. Despite being a good anime, Tamer ended and the morons decided "hey, lets just lose the partner altogether and make kids super heroes!" Yeah, that went so fricking well with Frontier. Their games weren't any better and kept changing.
The lack of digimon partners is just a surface level issue with Frontier, I can assure you that even if they'd kept the normal series dynamic it would have been garbage. It just wouldn't have immediately turned off as many normies.
It's an absolute dogshit anime. The characters get deus ex machina'd through the plot and don't even have any real chemistry. If you think this is a good anime, you have no standards.
>Gamefreak was smart enough to follow the same formula with their game without changing too much just so they can survive for a few years. Compare to Digimon, arguably its only good competitor. (...) Their games weren't any better and kept changing.
Because Digimon isn't a video game franchise, it's a virtual pet franchise.
IIRC, Frontier was a reaction to the v-pets not selling like they used to and Bandai wanting a new gimmick to make up the difference in toy sales. It was just a bad idea for a gimmick.
Digimon Frontier was a good anime, it just didn't really feel like Digimon.
No, Frontier was very boring and repetitive. If it had any redeeming qualities, the Digimon brand would have been enough to save it, at least in Japan.
Gen 5 was the end of the golden age, and ironically was the lowest point of it to the point where Gen 6 is highly ignored besides Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. Whether bland or underrated, X and Y is basically the all-time low for Pokémon in general.
It's Gen 3. This is when a-lot of people left Pokemon, either because they were burnt out, growing up, or disinterested. Doesn't help that Gold/Silver ended on a such a definitive note, with a trip back to Kanto and a final battle against the original hero. Ruby/Sapphire added a-lot of stuff, like Natures or Abilities or 2v2 Battles. But the core game remained the same. Pick a starter, collect Gym Badges, stop the evil teams, etc. To some people felt like Pokemon had effectively "stagnated".
it really sucks that both attempts at capturing an older audience backfired not because of the quality of the games, but because social stigmas and other popular games took over the world instead. (was ANYONE talking about pokemon when Halo and Halo 2 were the hottest trends?)
frick, we're never going to see a dex designed with cooler aesthetics in mind, over the cutesy shit made to sell toys.
>(was ANYONE talking about pokemon when Halo and Halo 2 were the hottest trends?)
umm...yes? Are you underage or something? Pokemon was still hot shit well into the 2000s. It was everywhere on shit like Newgrounds back then. You do realize Halo and Halo 2 both still sold less than the gen 3 Pokemon games right?
Gen 3. Yugioh became the new hotness by then and people were getting tired of Pokemon.
Gen 5 came out at the end of the DS' run and part of the surprise that it was even released came from the fact that everyone thought it would be a 3DS launch, not another DS game.
Evidently, both games came out at weird times, while trying to actually change the same boring formula.
>Gen 3. Yugioh became the new hotness by then and people were getting tired of Pokemon.
What? I never knew anyone who gave a shit about Yugioh. Nobody here was alive in 2003.
Pokemon never really "died down" but if I really had to pick what the low point for the series was, it would have to be Gen 3. That's when the anime stopped being relevant in the west and Pokemon movies stopped getting theatrical releases (I think the last anime movie to get a wide theatrical release in the west was the 4th one with Celebi. The 5th movie with Latios and Latias I think got a very limited theatrical run and every anime movie released since has been direct to video)
Gen 4 gave the series a slight boost again with HG/SS.
Also, the series' renaissance was not gen 5, gen 5 are amongst the lowest selling main games, it was more like between gen 7 and gen 8, because that's when Pokemon Go became the highest grossing mobile game of all time and was a cultural phenomenon and it's also when Pokemon got its first theatrical release since the 5th movie with Detective Pikachu. Its also during this time Sword and Sheild ended up being the second best selling games in the franchise (much to the chagrine of /vp/)
>Pokemon movies stopped getting theatrical releases
Yeah, but I think people still bought or rented pokemon movies 3-5.
When did they stop movies though? 5?
Because that one was garbage. 4 was good.
Pokemon movies have never exactly been masterpieces. The first movie was average at best (its only elevated by its supplimentary material, and the Mew origin movies didn't come out in the west for some fricking reason). Second movie wasn't that great either but its carried by its spectacle. I think the 3rd movie with Entei is easilly the best of the originals and is problably the closest the Pokemon anime movies have come to being "real movie" set in the Pokemon world instead of just an overglorified way to sell merchandise.
the 5th movie felt like the last time they at least tried to make a real movie even if they still failed. From the 6th movie, Jirachi Wishmaker and onwards its clear they stopped giving a shit and the overall quality of the animation is considerably worse.
>I think the 3rd movie with Entei is easilly the best of the originals
By far, the first 2 were pretty meh.
I remember watching that as a small kid and thinking about why it was better than the other two.
I haven't seen it since then, but I remember it being wild.
I also thought the one with celebi was good.
Then I lost interest with latios/the-other-one ones because it was boring as frick and they looked awful.
the second movie is what introduced my 5 year old self to Weird Al, so it gets a pass for me. Amongst the many things I could use to describe early to mid 2000s internet culture, "Weird Al Machinimas" are probably one of the biggest for me
Go absolutely saved pokemon's ass.
Now it's probably becoming untouchable though. If not, augmented reality has so much room. Still don't know why they haven't looked into augmented reality in the form of glasses or whatever so pokemon can become real again. They can't just do Go again because that ship's sailed. They need a new gimmick.
I also don't know why yu-gi-oh hasn't just made yu-gi-oh machines like the ones in the anime already. Chip the cards, then the cards can be used on a interactive interface that displays data about the yugioh battle. Give it animations. Could you imagine?
>Go absolutely saved pokemon's ass.
Pokemons ass didn't really "need saving" though. X and Y sold over 16 million copies and that's considered low for the series' standards. A lot of game franchises would kill to even have a single game sell over 5 million, let alone 3 times that. Pokemon Go definitely is what pushed Pokemon into the "untouchable" territory though.
>Pokemons ass didn't really "need saving" though.
You don't understand how big that company is mate. When it's that big, a small drop has massive consequences. The logistics were probably fricked for a while.
Hence the rush with arceus and now scarlet/violet so quickly after SS (only 2 years, which seems very fast for a new style open world and a new generation of games also in open world).
They're pushing for the sudden resurgence window.
>Direct to Video
M20 and the CGI one got theatrical releases. Everyone else was direct to DVD or premiered on Cartoon Network/Disney (mostly former). I think Koko was released on Netflix
Just by living since before pokemon was made i feel like gen 3 took the dive. I had a friend play through it but the rest of the group moved onto other things. Personally i really didnt like the design of groudon or kyrogre. They had weird circles and lines on them compared to the more naturalish looks of gen1/2. Ive played every other main game except r/s since then and its not that bad... but i still prefer gen1/2.
We need a real evil team again. Flare came close but rainbow rocket made me love team rocket all over again.
This one, Johto anime dragging for too long and RS looking like ass compared with the other GBA games, no transfer and all the shitty angular Digimon-like creatures.
For me it was Gen 5. The pokemon designs were just so strange that it unsettled me
I don't even know what's wrong with them in retrospect but I still feel the same way.
Gen 3 by far. It was just after the Poke Fever where geeks and nerds where still playing plus some loser kids. It took until Gen 6 when things started to become mainstream again.
Kid you have no idea how the Pokemania was. It wasn't just games it was a boom. Everything was Pokémon. Like no matter where you go someone had something about Pokémon. It was fricking insane and the closest thing to it was the Pokémon GO craze. By Gen 3 that shit died down real hard and like I said before only geeks and nerds and loser kids played it. No longer was it cool to play Pokémon.
I wasn't old enough to understand it at the time, but even in retrospect I can see why people hated that gen.
To me it was probably my favorite but only really because I was like 7/8 at the time and everything is great when you're 7/8 and dumb.
But I did notice that the older kids didn't play it as much as they used to (in fact it was popular with teens).
I think the major problem it had was that it was too childish compared to 1/2 which are far darker and cooler than every other gen other than maybe 7 (which was an anomaly given how gay 8 was).
The problem is, nintendo seem to market more to parents than kids nowadays because kids are so much harder to market to nowadays (i.e. they don't watch tv as much, they have completely different vectors for advertisement compared to kids in 2001).
So they market it to them as a "safe bet" option and that took all the actual grit out of it.
Plus there's the problem with it being perceived as "promoting bloodsports" so it immediately made it cuter with gen 3 just for that. Can't make it bloodthirsty like pokemon ate other pokemon or something like that, even though it was obvious.
Nah it wasn't nothing that complicated. The point of the matter is that Gen 3 was also the gen that new Hardware plus by the end of Gen 2 people were getting tired of Pokémon and then Yu-Gi-Oh came along and took its audience away.
>by the end of Gen 2 people were getting tired of Pokémon and then Yu-Gi-Oh came along and took its audience away
Not really, most tended to do both.
I loved both as a kid, Yu-Gi-Oh was actually considered nerdy and weird though.
Then again, most kids in my area were obsessed with fricking DBZ tazos and football cards so maybe we were an odd area.
Oh and beyblades. Beyblades were fricking cool for a while, though most kids didn't even watch the show they just liked cool ass spinning disks that flung off everything. God the teachers hated that shit kek.
>then Yu-Gi-Oh came along and took its audience away.
No, it didn't. Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon were so fricking different than they weren't even competing for the same audience. Yu-Gi-Oh MAYBE killed the TCGs. Nobody really watched the Yugi anime or played any of the games though
>Nobody really watched the Yugi anime
I used to have dreams where I was yugi in that anime. That's how much I wished I was that show. Yami yugi seemed total badass.
Nowadays I just spam Marik in girls clothing because that's the only interesting thing I take from it now. Imagine combining Moloch and Ishtar in the same name. They knew what they were doing.
How the times have changed.
Anyone who isn't blinded by nostalgia knows it was Gen 2. Crystal is still the lowest-selling mainline game. The movies started tanking. The anime spiraled into filler hell in order to prop up said movies unsuccessfully. Hasbro lost $25 million in Q1 2001 because people already weren't buying Pokemon toys/cards like they used to. Yu-Gi-Oh had overtaken Pokemon as the #1 toy brand by early 2002.
Gen 3 gets a ton of misplaced blame for "killing Pokemania" when the damage was already done before it even came out. Fads don't last forever even in the best of conditions, and Game Freak hadn't helped themselves by doing such a poor job of promoting Johto and its new Pokemon, causing people to get brand fatigue from seeing the same old shit too much.
The only correct answer is the time before Go was released.
Popularity has been on a steady (and natural) decline since pokemania and Go reignited it in a big way.
I think people forget that Gen7 had ultra sun/moon which honestly was the most fun I had with pokemon since Gen 2 Gold.
Mainly because Lusamine was such a hatefrickable type.
God I love her. Her design is sublime perfection. A hateable, yet loveable and sympathetical character that is so conflicting to players internally it comes off as super gap moe.
It has served my PP well.
I like the legendary for violet.
It's the best I've seen since gen 2.
I don't get why lightning taoist psychic dragon works but it just does.
Why am I thinking splinter from TMNT
>I hated Pokemerica
Colosseum and GoD were both good tbh
PLA isn't a new generation game and XY sold more than XW
BW is dead last
I'm honestly surprised USUM did so well as compared to BW2, Emerald, Crystal, Plat. It had the least amount of changes between them (Mantine Minigame, gift totems, haunted house, RR, Necrozma shit, and made Lusamine story worse)
Gen 4 to gen 5, ironically the most beloved games right now. I started with Silver on the GBC and i remember how unpopular the whole franchise was during the mid 2000s. Normies weren't hyped by DP because of the new designs, i can't believe that all these mons are considered some of the best now because nobody liked the starters and Dialga/Palkia, the hate was even more intense than with gen 3.
Pokemon has always been fairly popular, but the actual pokemania ended with the start of Gen 3, when most kids moved on to the next big thing, which was Yugioh in my country.
In my case i didn't care less for pokemon until i got a DS and emulated all gen 4 and 5 which i and many others still consider the golden age of the series in terms of quality.
I could be way off but this is the timeline as I understand it...
Gen 1 blew up in popularity because it was the fade at the time. Gen 2 saw a slight drop off but was still riding the original wave of popularity pretty well. Gen 3 was the first major drop in relevancy. The original fanbase was "outgrowing" Pokémon and the fade had passed. Even with the new mechanics, it still felt like more of the same to the average player. Two other things to take into account is that misty was no longer a main stay in the anime and the designs of gen 3 had a bit of a different style to gens 1 and 2. Gen 4 saw a resurgence because Pokémon was now being introduced to a new generation on top of the old diehard fans. It felt refined. The new designs were less "jarring" than gen 3 but kept still had a unique and cool feel to it. Also, I think the card game sold well at this time as well with all of you younger kids getting into Pokémon. Then gen 5 was another drop in popularity. I think it was a similar situation to gen 3. The fan base outgrew Pokémon and there was a general Pokémon burn out. Also, with the internet becoming even more accessible, memes about how "the new Pokémon designs are bad" could spread. Gen 5 was very ambitious in changing Pokémon, but it just wasn't the right time for that. The novelty of 3d Pokémon and mega evolutions was enough for gen 6 to have better sales, but the burn out was still real. Still a recovery. Gen 7 exploded pretty much completely because of Pokémon go. The anime has a good season prior to this helped build the hype for this gen, and some other stuff, but it really was just Pokémon go saving the franchise. Gen 8 was just riding the coat tails of gen 7. It is feeling like a cash grab didn't help, but with Covid and an increased acceptance of man child behavior, it did well enough. Gen 9 will probably do poorly because of burn out of the franchise and the game being underwhelming.
tl;dr >gen 1
Initial hype >gen 2
Still riding the trend >gen 3
Low point due to burn out and aging fan base >gen 4
Younger fan base and improved game >gen 5
Lowest point due to burn out and aging fanbase. Innovation compounded this. >gen 6
Still a low point, but 3D, the anime, and megas helped >gen 7
Pokemon go resurgence in old and new fans. >gen 8
Riding the fade and Covid helped >gen 9
Probably low point due to burn out and bad game.
I'm 31 and I remember losing complete interest in the anime around gen 3, but I liked the game, then I kind of dipped for gen 4 and 5 and came back for gen 6.
Depends on where, I would say right now. After the 2013 or so since sinnoh anime ended. Now I don't think children watch the anime and not much people have a switch as they had a ds, it's not popular, phones won over consoles.
I think somewhere between Gen 4 and 5. Not because of the lack of quality, infact those games are probably some of the best in the series. It’s just alot of people were going through that “pokemon is for babies, everything needs to be brown and bloom” phase. Another thing I noticed in my friend group is alot of people only bought one of the ds era games and didn’t pick the series back up until X/Y. Infact Almost all of my friends back into pokemon from X/Y and have bought every game sense. But that might also be because we were becoming adults and had jobs that let us afford games more often.
So basically >gen 1 kids growing out of pokemon >now as teenagers, they’re insecure about liking pokemon because “for babies” image at the height of the dudebro bloom era >now as adults they got back into the series and can afford every game now instead of having to rely on their parents
Just based on personal experience, a whole bunch of my friends and people i knew got out of pokemon by gen 5 and came back for x/y with the 3ds. I did play gen5 but didn't like it. to this day that and lets go are the only pokemon games i have never been able to finish. I'd imagine the real low point was when pokemania died out but then again id imagine pokemon popularity has still just kept going up since then. Now its gotta be more popular than ever especially now theyre doing collabs with clothing companies and getting famous popstars making all the music
I think there’s a difference between something being popular within it’s circle and something being popular to people outside of that circle. Like despite Yugioh seemingly being “dead” it still kept getting recording breaking attendance at Yugioh events.
Yugioh is one of the most popular tcgs in the world, it just lost the normalgay appeal. Konami launched the rush duel thing and a new promotional anime in order to make kids care again, since they were worried about the franchise turning into nothing but tournamenthomosexualry, but I think all that shit is still Japan-only.
Most people didn’t buy third versions back then, only the autists. But what I didn’t know is that BW2 and USUM did better by volume than Crystal/Emerald/Platinum, which is why they stopped doing just a singular third game. Pokemania had mostly died off around or right after gen 3 came out so it makes sense for the DS era to be the slowest period for the franchise
>W2 and USUM did better by volume than Crystal/Emerald/Platinum, which is why they stopped doing just a singular third game
I wonder if they started doing it with bw because platinum didn't get the sales they wanted so they decided theyd double up on them kek
Have to remind to zoomers that biggest selling point on franchise is still merchandises. Games only matters to promotions to next Gen, same goes to early anime series which was biggest impact before Pokemon GO.
The franchise was nowhere close to dying during gen 3. 16 million sales between Ruby and Sapphire was keeping the GBA afloat more than anything.
The real answer to this question is more complicated than naming a specific gen. The sales declines started happening toward the end of gen 2 for merchandise. You can see the decline in box office revenue for the movies as well. This continued going into gen 3, as well as the series seeing decline of the franchise overall (gen 2 selling worse than gen 1, gen 3 selling worse than gen 2). It was a slow decline over many years. Idk why you morons think one single gen can be attributed to anything here. I don't think we can even name a reason why. You can pinpoint the anime turning into a filler slog for why the franchise declined. You can name the unpopularity of Nintendo as a whole for a reason why the decline happened. You can point at kids wanting to look "mature" and gravitating towards M rated games like GTA and Halo as reasons for the decline. Rival IPs like Digimon and Yugioh might have taken away some of the fans too. Maybe it's a combination of all of these factors and more. The lack of a real agreement in this thread only shows that nobody knows why.
I'm an OG. I can tell all you youngins exactly how this shit went.
>1
Insane peak. I don't think there's really been anything like it since. Imagine peak fornite, mcu, and fidget spinners all combined in to one. >2
It sort of runs together for RBY for me. None of the pokemon were as popular as stuff from RBY though. In retrospect it was basically just a short extension DLC for pokemania >3
A lot of people fell off here. It was started to be viewed as childish and embarrassing. >4
About the same as 3.
people fricking HATED the cross gen evos and used them as evidence that the franchise has went to shit and has horrible designs >5
The bottom. It felt like you were part of a niche fanbase instead of the consoomer monster that it is. No one wanted to admit they liked Pokemon still, it was embarassing, but those days were comfy. The change in art style was highly ridiculed and drove even more people off. >6
About the same as 5 embarrassment wise but it was starting to gain some steam. They won back over some genwunners with the nostalgia pandering. >Gen 7
Pokemon Go changed everything. Normies still weren't really buying the games, but it wasn't embarrassing to be playing them anymore. It felt to me like a nice happy medium. >SwSh
Pokemon completely normalized thanks to Go and the popularity of the Switch.It is somehow more popular than ever despite the people who were there in the rough years becoming increasingly disenfranchised. Souless consoomers have taken over the fanbase.
>I was in college
There's your answer, I'm talking about 14/15/16 years old here.
There's a Pokemon thread on /vr/ right now where another anon also talks about how gen 5 was the point when the original genwun generation had finally grown out of its "Pokemon is for babies" teenage years.
[...]
Late gen 4/gen 5 is when it ACTUALLY became acceptable to like Pokemon again in the west. Not gen 6.
Also an OG. What you said is quite accurate. Go Pokémania of 2016 was only a quarter of what Gen 1 Pokémania was.
The first half of Gen 2 was certainly still riding the hype, that latter half is basically what
Anyone who isn't blinded by nostalgia knows it was Gen 2. Crystal is still the lowest-selling mainline game. The movies started tanking. The anime spiraled into filler hell in order to prop up said movies unsuccessfully. Hasbro lost $25 million in Q1 2001 because people already weren't buying Pokemon toys/cards like they used to. Yu-Gi-Oh had overtaken Pokemon as the #1 toy brand by early 2002.
Gen 3 gets a ton of misplaced blame for "killing Pokemania" when the damage was already done before it even came out. Fads don't last forever even in the best of conditions, and Game Freak hadn't helped themselves by doing such a poor job of promoting Johto and its new Pokemon, causing people to get brand fatigue from seeing the same old shit too much.
said.
Gen 3 was a low point due to combination of that, the soft reboot to the series, and the hard reboot with connectivity to the point that some people looking back claim it to be the first dexcut, which it was, not to the extent of what it is now and why people hate it.
Gen 4 picked up popularity during DP, but never got to full normie levels of mainstream.
Gen 5 was another soft reboot. Combine that with
By then the DS was old and there was mass produced affordable flash carts so it was extremely easy to pirate games and Gen 5 came to Japan like more than half a year before the World and the game was fan translated long before it was officially released. This was the reason going forward Pokémon went for Global Releases and even then games can leak but a week or so is not as bad as months.
and you can see why the lowest point is contested between it and Gen 3.
To me, the happy medium was Gen 4, not 7, but that could be my opinion on the latter as a game being not as favorable.
Somewhere after gen 3 came out, by that point the anime had become a repetitive piece of shit that only became worse and worse
Later the G4 games came out and killed all mainstream appeal left
Then Pokémon GO brought it back from its grave and it became normie
I think the reason why many people screech gen 5 here is because people here are core fans compared to the normies.
Gen 3 lost a lot of the casual fans, but I believe that gen 5 lost a lot of the core fans.
I still remember seeing watchdog and decided the first time to just skip a generation. Many pokemons just looked overdiseigned. Some characters looked straight out of yugioh zexal.
Also the new dex was too much, with many designs being quite weak or copies of gen 1 pokemons.
I loved the gen 4 dex because it gave many shitmons new evolutions and even some pre-evos. Thereby making the dex feel "conected" to the previous gen.
Everyone bought ruby and Sapphire despite all the negativity surrounding it. In my school everyone also bought Black/white when it came out probably because those kids that grew up on the original games finally got over their pokemon is uncool phase. Gen 4 I don't remember anyone playing Pokemon much so that would be my pick, that feels like when a lot of people actively decided not to buy as opposed to gen 3 where it was the next thing immediately following pokemania.
Did people at that time even like Gen 5's story or were they too busy letting Garbador and Vanilluxe rent free? Genuinue curious considering it's story been sucked off in recent years
Gen V was leaked very early. So it kind of went through cycles. Everyone hated the story and narrative at first because leakers just spedrun through the game and everyone seemed worried about their Pokemon. It didn't help that the plot kind of asks for a return of following Pokemon and they plain didn't do it. (This was actually a bigger deal back then) After a while, the leakers went back and actually played it and were the OG Gen-5 gays because they liked the story and the fact that Pokemon seemed to have one.
Then the game came out stateside, people spedran, hated it, and cared more about Pokemon not being in and odd designs. After a while, they grew to like it.
B2W2 made people appreciate it a lot more too.
In terms of everything, I remember things similar to this
>Late gen 4/gen 5 is when it ACTUALLY became acceptable to like Pokemon again in the west. Not gen 6.
Seems to be an acceptable line, yeah.
. Pokemon was unpopular with kiddies, but people who grew up on it appreciated that the characters seemed aged up and they tried something different. I was 18 at that time and starting college.
I remember really liking the idea of having all new pokemon on a new region that wasn't Japanese-inspired, made sense to me and gave me a similar feel to exploring the franchise for the first time, not knowing what kind of pokemon I would find. You could get your old mons in postgame so really it was at least better than the dexcut fiasco we currently have going.
It was ironic
Adults picked up on childrens/early teens that played pokemon and then all ended up searching for the same mons they shatted on years ago on the streets
End of Gen 2 and start of Gen 3 when Pokemania ended was when the biggest dip occurred.
Right after HGSS was the lowest overall point, which is sad given how good Gen 5 is when you actually play it (having similar range of shitmon and cool as Gen 1 just without as much nostalgia now) and weren't the childish people back during release who hated its regional dex use or the childish people now who try and emulate those people to seem like their not super zoomers. Though its anime is by far the lowest point for it.
Gen 6 started similar but improved anime, ORAS and GO at 11th hour pulled it up. It's start was also with the last wave of "Pokemon is for babies" thing in any sizeable amount, was basically 3 for the kids who started with the corresponding Gen who had it seen as cool again 3 gens latter (One ending late gen 4, 2nd ending late gen 5 and this one dying a bit earlier but still latter half of Gen 6).
And now over the last few years we've kinda been brought back into late Pokemania popularity and stayed there.
>The only female Pikachus are the cosplay Pikachus
Did they forget that Regular Pikachu's gender ratios are 50% male and 50% female, why is all the Regular Pikachus male?
I don’t have anything to back this up but it feels like a lot of people left the franchise at gen 5 including myself. The BW anime is also really unpopular with fans.
i liked it more than pokemon diamond, but both felt like a step down from the world of 3
>but platinum
why the frick would i even want to go back after a shit slog of a first impression
>>but platinum
Sinnoh is just boring
sales figures agree too
The series lost more people from Gen 1 to 2 and from Gen 2 to 3, than from 4 to 5 anons. The death of pokémania in the west was unironically the lowest the series was in popularity, as the massive normie interest withered away to nothing, leaving hte invested and the children to continue. Engagement stayed high in Japan, but that's because everyone accepted it for what it was/didn't shit on it for being kiddy-focused, like in the days of PS2 and Xbox in america.
Yeah Gen 2 game and anime felt "cute" and for kids, and Americans worship cool over anything
>The death of pokémania in the west was unironically the lowest the series was in popularity, as the massive normie interest withered away to nothing, leaving hte invested and the children to continue. Engagement stayed high in Japan
I wanted to see if this was really true so I just spent the past couple of minutes making this
GAME: Total sales (Japan sales | Overseas sales) [Overseas sales per Japanese sale]
RB: 31,380,000 (10,230,000 | 21,150,000) [2.1]
GS: 23,700,000 (7,170,000 | 16,530,000) [2.3]
RS: 16,220,000 (5,400,000 | 10,820,000) [2]
DP: 17,670,000 (5,850,000 | 11,820,000) [2]
BW: 15,640,000 (5,540,000 | 10,100,000) [1.8]
XY: 16,650,000 (4,560,000 | 12,090,000) [2.6]
SM: 16,290,000 (3,940,000 | 12,350,000) [3.1]
SS: 25,370,000 (5,840,000 | 19,890,000) [3.4]
If we go by ratios, that doesn't seem to be true at all with the lowest ratio and lowest overall sales in the west belonging to Black and White.
I've been looking for something like this whenever those game sales images get posted. Thanks.
>That ratio for SS
What happened overseas?
It’s insane that we’re in 2022 and 99% of morons still reflexively screech “gen 5” without ever taking notice of the massive sales drops that happened between gens 1-3. This board is truly braindead.
>RS just 200k over BW when it had a 4 year cycle instead of the usual 3
and people still deny gen 3 was the lowest point
First Pokemania ended during 2000 which proves with a chart but a second coming happened when DS was revolutionary thanks to new gimmicks with online functional.
I would hardly call the DS generation a second pokemania, gen 4 and gen 5 didn't sell that much better compared to 3. Second pokemania was pokemon go at launch
There was nothing wrong with the gen 5 anime.
Anecdotally, my friend group also went through their "Pokémon is for babies" phase around the end of Gen 4 and picked the series back up again around Gen 7 (though some were a bit earlier/later than that) I stuck with it though, and Gen 5 is still my personal favorite overall
I dropped the series when I was a teen and saw gen 5's early designs, you're greeted in a generation by the ugliest route 1 shitmons to this day, and there is nothing from the previous gens to fall back on, and even the starters were pretty bad, and I hated the monkeys.
Gen 5 has some mons I love, but they were too late in the game for me to even see them back then.
>you're greeted in a generation by the ugliest route 1 shitmons to this day
What's funny is I thought this about SV. But then the leaks showed some cool designs so I'm more interested. TPC needs to work on their marketing.
Yeah, same for me honestly, of the designs they revealed, I only really liked ceruledge, which wasn't even in scarlet, but actually playing the game I found plenty of stuff I liked
yeah i kind of fell out of the series before gen 5 too and came back for gen 7
for some reason i didnt like vidya as much when i was in high school but picked it up again in college
Was it due to everyone disliking Gen 5 or was it because Gen 4's slower gameplay and overhauled phys/special split made people skip Gen 5? I love the split but I can imagine a normie not being as succesful running the same movesets as always on their favs could've caused some friction
No it was because too many Gen V Pokemon look moronic and the premise of the story was dumb as well
>villain convinces a world entirely based on human-Pokemon interaction that this is bad
>if I dumb something down that means it was always dumb!
The split is why I just can’t bring myself to replay Gen 1-3 anymore. The fact stuff like shadow ball still lowers special def despite being physical is so pants on head moronic.
should've given horns to these guys like the original plan was
Problem was that a lot of the original poke fans were now teens or adults by gen 5 so it sorta was stuck in a gen gap.
But now many of that gen have children and there's the whole pokemon go phenomena that obviously stimulated it a bit since.
So now it's apparently peaking again.
Ditto here,I couldn't wait for gen 4, played it on nosgba, loved heart gold too, then platinum. The connection to previous gens was important. But the slow gameplay loop, new pokemon being weird, and me being ~18 at the time, games like red dead 1,gta V coming out soon etc, I didn't really care,but now, after gen 6 (3 remasters), gen 7 which I liked, transition to switch which is questionable but still in progress, I seem to love it again, being almost 30. Let's me escape this world well.
Yeah same here I didn't buy BW2 because I was burnt out at the end of the DS era
This is the correct answer, and this is coming from an unovagay. When gen 5 came out most of the people who had been playing up to that point had become teens and entered their "haha pokemon is for kids, you still play that??" phase, I only ever saw it being talked about on Tumblr and nowhere else. But then the 3DS was such a big thing that when XY got announced (specially being the first 3D game and all) and with those teens having grown up, it's like everyone came back at once and it became cool again, this time for good.
Gen 5 came out 15 years after the franchise's debut, most of the people that had started with gen 1 had grown OUT of their "haha Pokemon is for babies" at that point.
Yeah no. This is one of those "you just had to be there" moments.
I was in college when gen 5 debuted. Nobody still thought Pokemon was for babies.
>I was in college
There's your answer, I'm talking about 14/15/16 years old here.
Kids that were 14/15/16 years old during gen 5 weren't playing gen 1 when gen 1 was current, they were shitting their diapers at best.
Yeah, Gen 5 happened to come out right around the time where I was moving on. It was also one of the last video games I asked for instead of bought myself which probably had a lot to do with why I didn't like it, there was a certain degree of shame attached with asking for a Pokemon game at that age. I distinctly remember asking for it in a "heh, Pokemon, huh... I GUESS I'll give it a shot" kind of way. I was a real homosexual in my mid -teens.
No People left AFTER gen4 and that is shown by 5gen sales
I dropped off at Gen 5 too. I was hyped for BW like I hadn't been for a new game in a long time, but when I actually got White and played it I wasn't satisfied with it and never bothered to pick up the sequel.
I wish I had, because BW2 is decent, but I didn't come back until ORAS
I fricking loved BW when it came out personally, but I have to admit the start of Gen 5 was when people at school just stopped caring. There were 1 or 2 guys maybe that were still into Pokemon, but they pretended they weren't into it because they were afraid of being judged.
>one of the, if not the best selling entry in the franchise
>when most people left
Everyone knows Too Much Water was when most people left. That was when most kids became tweens/teens and wanted to disassociate with kiddy things like Pokemon.
BW is literally the worst selling new generation game in the series you schizo
Yet it has comparable sales as gen 3-7. Gen 2 however saw the biggest drop in sales from one gen to the next and gen1-3 is the steepest drop in sales ever seen in the franchise. You’re either moronic or letting your gen 5 hate blind you to the fact it was gens 2 and 3 that “killed” pokemon if it ever happened
That would be XY, followed by PLA.
Maybe YOU need to take YOUR meds, frickhead.
PLA isn't a new generation game and XY sold more than XW
BW is dead last
>XW
BW
This, I vividly remember this was the point where me and my friends started thinking pokemon was a cringe game for toddlers and I did my best to distance myself from the franchise, oddly enough Gen 5 seems to be one of the most loved generations nowadays, I'm personally a huge fan of BW2, that's my favorite pokemon game.
A combination of the whole "too old/cool for pokemon" mood being at its peak and genwunners being the dominate fan group at the time
I remember gen 5 being so hated by normies and the only thing they hated was the pokemo designs of that generation. I feel with the more recent gens normies don't hate the new designs as much even if they are worse.
Either Gen 3 or Gen 5.
This. Doesn't BW have the lowest sales?
Yes, but that's not when Pokemon was the least popular.
BW was also leaked and fan translated about eight months before the game actually came out. I remember replaying it for the first time in the official version and hating the EN names.
By then the DS was old and there was mass produced affordable flash carts so it was extremely easy to pirate games and Gen 5 came to Japan like more than half a year before the World and the game was fan translated long before it was officially released. This was the reason going forward Pokémon went for Global Releases and even then games can leak but a week or so is not as bad as months.
>By then the DS was old and there was mass produced affordable flash carts so it was extremely easy to pirate games and Gen 5 came to Japan like more than half a year before the World and the game was fan translated long before it was officially released
I think the same could be said for hgss also i got that game like 5 months early when i was younger a bunch of people i knew had flashcarts i had had and r4 for a couple years at that point. Did bw even sell bad? i jsut looked at the numbers and it was the same as dp
Oh frick I forgot flashcarts were everywhere on the ds. Yea that probably did a number to the sales too.
Gen 3. Pokemon was seen as something "uncool." It was last year's fad, and generally associated with young children. People who played Gens 1 and 2 in middle school had to keep quiet about still playing Pokemon in high school.
Gen 5 came at the height of the DS and was part of the Pokemon Renaissance that lead to /vp/ being created.
Pretty sure the Renaissance happened with HGSS.
It started with HGSS, but continued to grow well into 5th gen.
Maybe B2W2, but BW was the big reason when "genwunners" started to be a thing, as many people were turned off by not being able to see any of their favorites until post game.
Lol, look at what
said, people didn't give a shit about B2W2 until years later because it was practically a 3DS game before people even bought them.
>as many people were turned off by not being able to see any of their favorites until post game
If only they knew what would happen in gen 8+ kek
I loved Gen 5 so much for doing that, Hate that no other title afterward did a whole "original regional dex" for the main game after
gen 5 probably, frickton of ugly designs and it was the point where series was the most stagnated so no one gave a frick about the franchise except hardcore fans who buy every game and children.
Late Gen 3 easily. It's not even up for debate. Liking Pokemon during that time (2004-2006) was a social death sentence.
Out of curiosity, why? I was under the impression that gen 3 was pretty big in the days
Gen 3 is one of the lowest selling generations in the entire series. A lot of kids who were around for Pokemania were getting older and wanted to distance themselves from it to look cooler. Edgy, brown and bloom was starting to get popular.
>Gen 3 is one of the lowest selling generations in the entire series.
Gen 3 sold better than 5 and 6.
That's why I said "one of the lowest", not "the lowest".
I was a closet Pokémon fan in my teens. Like I stop Pokémon for a couple of years but then I saw Pokémon Ruby for cheap and bought it and started liking Pokémon again but I could not be seen with it cause I wanted to be hip and cool yo. This was before being geek was trendy and where if they saw you playing kids games you were made fun of.
It isn't even the game's fault. ruby and sapphire came when the pokemania was dead. Something that now is impossible to happen again i think.
The games still having ugly ass sprites not protected by novelty didn't help. Also who the frick ever had a GBA?
>Also who the frick ever had a GBA?
80 million peple did apparently. And thanks to backwards compatibility with the GB and GBC it was also easilly the best console of the GameBoy line.
you just outed yourself as a zoomer, you little homosexual b***h
>The games still having ugly ass sprites not protected by novelty didn't help.
Anon, 16/32-bit graphics have probably aged better than any other graphical style. There's a reason the Gen 3 modding community is by far the largest and its not even close. Its because simple 2D cartoon artstyles still hold up to this day. The Gen 3 games aged far better than any gen before or since from a graphics standpoint.
>who the frick ever had a GBA?
Legit one of the dumbest questions I've ever seen.
It's like third-lowest all-time and sold 10m more than BW. Gen 3 actually enshrined the average Pokémon audience figures when the series left the world's most popular handheld gaming unit (average total sales for paired new Gen games between Gen 3 and 7 was 16.47m, RS sold 16.22m). The extras above that average, RGB's 31m, SS's 25.37, GS's 23m, THEY'RE the outliers, or rather - they're the total sales when normies, legit actual normies buy into a popular game on a popular system.
The thing you kids forget is most of who you see leave get replaced that same Gen by fresh blood and while a loss of about 2m is big, it's in no way comparable to the 8 and 7 million they lost jumping from Gen 1 to Gen 2 or from 2 to 3.
When Pokemania ended, only very young children still cared about Pokemon, so anyone that was still interested in it was an easy target for bullying. Thus, for any that weren't totally autistic, they began to despise Pokemon because they now associated it with getting bullied by their peers.
Gen 3. Gen 5 was also very unpopular but by then people stopped giving a shit if other people played pokemon.
Pokemania had pretty much died down by then, and around that time, many other companies were trying to capture the "western" audience with edgier games (see Shadow the Hedgehog) and so by comparison pokemon was seen as shit for babies.
I got that game late as a kid so I suspect they didn't market it in store or something as well as gen 1/2 because my parents didn't see it until I pestered them about it.
Then again, I didn't pester them earlier so maybe the marketing failed to even get to me.
Back then it was TV ads, advertisement posters, merch and the anime that marketed pokemon games.
Nowadays the marketing is totally different. I don't see any posters for pokemon anymore and the show is probably the only thing remaining from that generation of marketing.
The rest must be viral and the way people see others interact with pokemon - i.e. pokemon go and portable games played in public.
Then there's the console - gen 4 succeeded because the DS was hot shit back in the day.
Kids grew up and the poke fever died down. The anime was being more shitty than usual didn't help. Thinking back, I am amazed it survive that drought.
The DS was the reason why it survived initially I think.
How it survived the 3DS is beyond me. No one had a fricking 3DS unless they were nerds.
The gen 3 anime was a massive step up from the gen 2 one, the problem was more than the gen 2 one being so shitty led to way too many fans just dropping the anime permanently.
They didn't give you the opportunity to import any old pokemon, they added stupid trading restriction so you can't get certain pokemon until you finish the majority of the game.
Ruby and Sapphire was mostly new pokemon old fans didn't like. Catching them all required a significant amount of hardware since many players dropped off. etc
Anon gen 3 games combined still sold over 20M units sure it might not have been as much as red and blue but it was still pretty big. I'm a gen 3 zoomer and I can say almost every kid was playing or knew about pokemon back in my elementary days and I'm from a poorgay country where nintendo was really unpopular and barelly bothered advertsing here.
the IGN boards(lol) andGanker literally were my only outlet to discuss about pokemon. every kid I knew lost interest in pokemon once ruby and sapphire came out.
>remembering how the Newgrounds Pokemon section in the mid 2000s was just vids of Pokemon dying, no actual Pokemon fans could be found
It's gen 5. The anime was a disaster, BW was hated by genwunners and seen by most as a downgrade after HGSS, and BW2 released after the 3DS was already out and people already were excited for a 3D gen 6.
Gen 5
Shit games
Shit anime
Shit designs
I hate that I can tell those Pikachu are CGI
So you're telling me they're not IRL Pikachu?
Liking Pokemon during Gen 3-6 was social suicide in the west until ecelebs and Pokemon Go made it acceptable to like the franchise again to normies.
Gen 5 sucked on a global scale tho.
Gen 3, the advance era was the only pokemon era where you got made fun at for playing
someone made a comic for this but I dont have it
This one?
Factually incorrect.
>le controversial father webcomic author
At least she didn't went the VGcats route I hope...
Needs an update with neckbeard loners and also successful dads with kids playing it.
I went to college with Katie, most of the people in the last panel are real people I know
>2010 was 22 years ago
>seeing them with the regular DS and pokewalker
it hurts
100000% gen 5. The sales alone attest to that. Shit gen 5 almost made me quit, gen 6 was able to bring me back though and I'm glad it did since gen 7 was fricking incredible.
My personal experience was Gen 3. That was when people around me stopped playing, made fun of each other for playing & I didn't see nearly as much hype in general surrounding the franchise. It had "died down" and most of us were in high school by that point.
DS did bring back interest for some, due to the online, but I didn't see a true resurgence until HGSS for the Pokewalker. Everyone was hyped about that.
After that I just straight up didn't see normies talk about it again in general until GO happened.
Gen 5 is the start of the NuPokemon era
and the franchise went downhill from there
When Logan Paul and a bunch of Mainstream trashcan people decided pokemon cards are the new bitcoin and made idiots put GPS trackers on distributor trucks and even shoot people in Target parking lots over boxes of pokemon cards.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/14/target-removes-trading-cards-from-stores-after-violent-incident-with-gun.html
Man i remember when I was collecting pokemon cards old gen 3 stuff went for like $3.00-$5.00. Now it goes for $50.00-$150.00, check for your self.
I wish i didn't sell all my pokemon shit when i was like 13/14 i was like im gonna stop playing pokemon im growing up sold all of my stuff at car boot sales. was playing watching the bw anime a few months later and playing pokemon again within a year kek
6 as a personal experience answer; it was the most puddle-thin shit generation to date, even SwShit got decent so-I-hear DLC at least
Basically lived and died by a wildly varying in quality array of (mostly) Gen. 1 pander Megas, stupid overpowered freebie mons in an already too easy series
3DS was just less successful and prolific of a console than the DS before it, and I no lie never encountered a soul playing Pokémon in public during those few years of Gen. 6
I remember being excited at the on-paper idea of Pokémon going 3D but upon seeing the first brief glimpse of gameplay, I immediately lost all interest in getting any of that generation of games; it was that ugly and off-putting, to me anyway
…
But objectively, I guess it was Black & White
But I will say, when they came out those were actually really popular with kids around me as well as myself, so I don’t think the sales are everything at the individual level
Like I said, I’d never had so little exposure to people playing Pokémon in public than during X/Y and ORAS: even younger kids at Summer camps or friends’ younger siblings, never saw it
I figure part of it was that the 3DS was more costly compared to its predecessors, and a lot of people thought the 3D was gimmicky (it was); I think just less kids owned 3DSes
But yeah that’s my “frick Gen. 6” input, but ig it was objectively B/W (but in spite of that, those were the height of the sprite-based era, polished to a mirror shine so W)
>polished to a mirror shine so W
Ah yes, BW were polished to a "mirror shine" alright.
>stills in a game with animated sprites
>just that, no acknowledgment of the overworld
Feels sorta like “screenshot a show’s smear frames; say animation looks bad” energy.
>“screenshot a show’s smear frames; say animation looks bad”
It does.
>thinks Gen 6 is bad; proceeds to wiener suck Gen 5 despite it being objectively worse in almost every regard
>cries about gen 1 pandering
>mentions "smear frames" even though he blatantly doesn't know what smear frames are to pretend to know what he's talking about and defend objectively poorly made sprites
you can smell the unovahomosexualry coming off these posts. This guy was probably a fricking 8 year old when BW released.
>cries about gen 1 pandering but wienersucks notGen 1, BW
Gen 5. People saw the shit pokemon designs and left.
Between gens 3 and 5. Ironic since it was the golden age of the series.
correct opinion
>Between gens 3 and 5. Ironic since it was the golden age of the series.
well that might explain a few things.
I have to agree with this statement. The anime fatigue was there and lost its charm. Gamefreak was smart enough to follow the same formula with their game without changing too much just so they can survive for a few years. Compare to Digimon, arguably its only good competitor. Despite being a good anime, Tamer ended and the morons decided "hey, lets just lose the partner altogether and make kids super heroes!" Yeah, that went so fricking well with Frontier. Their games weren't any better and kept changing.
The lack of digimon partners is just a surface level issue with Frontier, I can assure you that even if they'd kept the normal series dynamic it would have been garbage. It just wouldn't have immediately turned off as many normies.
Digimon Frontier was a good anime, it just didn't really feel like Digimon.
It's an absolute dogshit anime. The characters get deus ex machina'd through the plot and don't even have any real chemistry. If you think this is a good anime, you have no standards.
>Gamefreak was smart enough to follow the same formula with their game without changing too much just so they can survive for a few years. Compare to Digimon, arguably its only good competitor. (...) Their games weren't any better and kept changing.
Because Digimon isn't a video game franchise, it's a virtual pet franchise.
IIRC, Frontier was a reaction to the v-pets not selling like they used to and Bandai wanting a new gimmick to make up the difference in toy sales. It was just a bad idea for a gimmick.
No, Frontier was very boring and repetitive. If it had any redeeming qualities, the Digimon brand would have been enough to save it, at least in Japan.
I share this sentiment, its weird how the darkest time for the series has the best gems in it.
Not really. The more popular something is, the less effort needs to be put into it because it sells anyway.
Gen 5 was the end of the golden age, and ironically was the lowest point of it to the point where Gen 6 is highly ignored besides Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. Whether bland or underrated, X and Y is basically the all-time low for Pokémon in general.
When it was at its highest point in terms of quality. Just goes to show you everything gets ruined when it goes mainstream.
Pokemon went main stream immediately on the day gen 1 first released you zoomer fricktard.
It's Gen 3. This is when a-lot of people left Pokemon, either because they were burnt out, growing up, or disinterested. Doesn't help that Gold/Silver ended on a such a definitive note, with a trip back to Kanto and a final battle against the original hero. Ruby/Sapphire added a-lot of stuff, like Natures or Abilities or 2v2 Battles. But the core game remained the same. Pick a starter, collect Gym Badges, stop the evil teams, etc. To some people felt like Pokemon had effectively "stagnated".
Ruby saphire by far
it really sucks that both attempts at capturing an older audience backfired not because of the quality of the games, but because social stigmas and other popular games took over the world instead. (was ANYONE talking about pokemon when Halo and Halo 2 were the hottest trends?)
frick, we're never going to see a dex designed with cooler aesthetics in mind, over the cutesy shit made to sell toys.
>(was ANYONE talking about pokemon when Halo and Halo 2 were the hottest trends?)
umm...yes? Are you underage or something? Pokemon was still hot shit well into the 2000s. It was everywhere on shit like Newgrounds back then. You do realize Halo and Halo 2 both still sold less than the gen 3 Pokemon games right?
Gen 3. Yugioh became the new hotness by then and people were getting tired of Pokemon.
Gen 5 came out at the end of the DS' run and part of the surprise that it was even released came from the fact that everyone thought it would be a 3DS launch, not another DS game.
Evidently, both games came out at weird times, while trying to actually change the same boring formula.
>Gen 3. Yugioh became the new hotness by then and people were getting tired of Pokemon.
What? I never knew anyone who gave a shit about Yugioh. Nobody here was alive in 2003.
idk I was 11 in 2003 and I remember yugioh being quite popular. nowhere near the peak of pokemon of course, but still popular nonetheless.
Unova
Gen 5-6ish?
Apparently it's now back to Gen 2 levels which is kinda insane.
Pokemon never really "died down" but if I really had to pick what the low point for the series was, it would have to be Gen 3. That's when the anime stopped being relevant in the west and Pokemon movies stopped getting theatrical releases (I think the last anime movie to get a wide theatrical release in the west was the 4th one with Celebi. The 5th movie with Latios and Latias I think got a very limited theatrical run and every anime movie released since has been direct to video)
Gen 4 gave the series a slight boost again with HG/SS.
Also, the series' renaissance was not gen 5, gen 5 are amongst the lowest selling main games, it was more like between gen 7 and gen 8, because that's when Pokemon Go became the highest grossing mobile game of all time and was a cultural phenomenon and it's also when Pokemon got its first theatrical release since the 5th movie with Detective Pikachu. Its also during this time Sword and Sheild ended up being the second best selling games in the franchise (much to the chagrine of /vp/)
>Pokemon movies stopped getting theatrical releases
Yeah, but I think people still bought or rented pokemon movies 3-5.
When did they stop movies though? 5?
Because that one was garbage. 4 was good.
Hadn't seen any since 5.
Pokemon movies have never exactly been masterpieces. The first movie was average at best (its only elevated by its supplimentary material, and the Mew origin movies didn't come out in the west for some fricking reason). Second movie wasn't that great either but its carried by its spectacle. I think the 3rd movie with Entei is easilly the best of the originals and is problably the closest the Pokemon anime movies have come to being "real movie" set in the Pokemon world instead of just an overglorified way to sell merchandise.
the 5th movie felt like the last time they at least tried to make a real movie even if they still failed. From the 6th movie, Jirachi Wishmaker and onwards its clear they stopped giving a shit and the overall quality of the animation is considerably worse.
>I think the 3rd movie with Entei is easilly the best of the originals
By far, the first 2 were pretty meh.
I remember watching that as a small kid and thinking about why it was better than the other two.
I haven't seen it since then, but I remember it being wild.
I also thought the one with celebi was good.
Then I lost interest with latios/the-other-one ones because it was boring as frick and they looked awful.
Yeah gen 3 looked so bad ay.
the second movie is what introduced my 5 year old self to Weird Al, so it gets a pass for me. Amongst the many things I could use to describe early to mid 2000s internet culture, "Weird Al Machinimas" are probably one of the biggest for me
I watched it as an 8 yr old and I'm pretty sure I'd already watched the animatrix by then, so I wasn't as impressed.
Go absolutely saved pokemon's ass.
Now it's probably becoming untouchable though. If not, augmented reality has so much room. Still don't know why they haven't looked into augmented reality in the form of glasses or whatever so pokemon can become real again. They can't just do Go again because that ship's sailed. They need a new gimmick.
I also don't know why yu-gi-oh hasn't just made yu-gi-oh machines like the ones in the anime already. Chip the cards, then the cards can be used on a interactive interface that displays data about the yugioh battle. Give it animations. Could you imagine?
>Go absolutely saved pokemon's ass.
Pokemons ass didn't really "need saving" though. X and Y sold over 16 million copies and that's considered low for the series' standards. A lot of game franchises would kill to even have a single game sell over 5 million, let alone 3 times that. Pokemon Go definitely is what pushed Pokemon into the "untouchable" territory though.
>Pokemons ass didn't really "need saving" though.
You don't understand how big that company is mate. When it's that big, a small drop has massive consequences. The logistics were probably fricked for a while.
Hence the rush with arceus and now scarlet/violet so quickly after SS (only 2 years, which seems very fast for a new style open world and a new generation of games also in open world).
They're pushing for the sudden resurgence window.
>Direct to Video
M20 and the CGI one got theatrical releases. Everyone else was direct to DVD or premiered on Cartoon Network/Disney (mostly former). I think Koko was released on Netflix
Just by living since before pokemon was made i feel like gen 3 took the dive. I had a friend play through it but the rest of the group moved onto other things. Personally i really didnt like the design of groudon or kyrogre. They had weird circles and lines on them compared to the more naturalish looks of gen1/2. Ive played every other main game except r/s since then and its not that bad... but i still prefer gen1/2.
We need a real evil team again. Flare came close but rainbow rocket made me love team rocket all over again.
>rainbow rocket made me love team rocket all over again.
That and Lusamine reminded me how good pokemon could pull off villains.
Volo wasn't well executed, but also had that feel of "frick everyone but me, I want all the power mwahahahah" feel.
Gen 5 is the lowest point of Pokemon
its a Reboot that failed
This one, Johto anime dragging for too long and RS looking like ass compared with the other GBA games, no transfer and all the shitty angular Digimon-like creatures.
For me it was Gen 5. The pokemon designs were just so strange that it unsettled me
I don't even know what's wrong with them in retrospect but I still feel the same way.
Gen 3 by far. It was just after the Poke Fever where geeks and nerds where still playing plus some loser kids. It took until Gen 6 when things started to become mainstream again.
Believe it or not, there were small children that played gen 3.
I was one of them.
Kid you have no idea how the Pokemania was. It wasn't just games it was a boom. Everything was Pokémon. Like no matter where you go someone had something about Pokémon. It was fricking insane and the closest thing to it was the Pokémon GO craze. By Gen 3 that shit died down real hard and like I said before only geeks and nerds and loser kids played it. No longer was it cool to play Pokémon.
Anyone who is not a zoomer knows it was Gen III
I wasn't old enough to understand it at the time, but even in retrospect I can see why people hated that gen.
To me it was probably my favorite but only really because I was like 7/8 at the time and everything is great when you're 7/8 and dumb.
But I did notice that the older kids didn't play it as much as they used to (in fact it was popular with teens).
I think the major problem it had was that it was too childish compared to 1/2 which are far darker and cooler than every other gen other than maybe 7 (which was an anomaly given how gay 8 was).
The problem is, nintendo seem to market more to parents than kids nowadays because kids are so much harder to market to nowadays (i.e. they don't watch tv as much, they have completely different vectors for advertisement compared to kids in 2001).
So they market it to them as a "safe bet" option and that took all the actual grit out of it.
Plus there's the problem with it being perceived as "promoting bloodsports" so it immediately made it cuter with gen 3 just for that. Can't make it bloodthirsty like pokemon ate other pokemon or something like that, even though it was obvious.
Also, what these "older kids" felt for gen 3, I had felt for gen 4. Which is strange.
Nah it wasn't nothing that complicated. The point of the matter is that Gen 3 was also the gen that new Hardware plus by the end of Gen 2 people were getting tired of Pokémon and then Yu-Gi-Oh came along and took its audience away.
>by the end of Gen 2 people were getting tired of Pokémon and then Yu-Gi-Oh came along and took its audience away
Not really, most tended to do both.
I loved both as a kid, Yu-Gi-Oh was actually considered nerdy and weird though.
Then again, most kids in my area were obsessed with fricking DBZ tazos and football cards so maybe we were an odd area.
Oh and beyblades. Beyblades were fricking cool for a while, though most kids didn't even watch the show they just liked cool ass spinning disks that flung off everything. God the teachers hated that shit kek.
Oh and digimon.
>then Yu-Gi-Oh came along and took its audience away.
No, it didn't. Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon were so fricking different than they weren't even competing for the same audience. Yu-Gi-Oh MAYBE killed the TCGs. Nobody really watched the Yugi anime or played any of the games though
>Nobody really watched the Yugi anime
I used to have dreams where I was yugi in that anime. That's how much I wished I was that show. Yami yugi seemed total badass.
Nowadays I just spam Marik in girls clothing because that's the only interesting thing I take from it now. Imagine combining Moloch and Ishtar in the same name. They knew what they were doing.
How the times have changed.
Anyone who isn't blinded by nostalgia knows it was Gen 2. Crystal is still the lowest-selling mainline game. The movies started tanking. The anime spiraled into filler hell in order to prop up said movies unsuccessfully. Hasbro lost $25 million in Q1 2001 because people already weren't buying Pokemon toys/cards like they used to. Yu-Gi-Oh had overtaken Pokemon as the #1 toy brand by early 2002.
Gen 3 gets a ton of misplaced blame for "killing Pokemania" when the damage was already done before it even came out. Fads don't last forever even in the best of conditions, and Game Freak hadn't helped themselves by doing such a poor job of promoting Johto and its new Pokemon, causing people to get brand fatigue from seeing the same old shit too much.
The only correct answer is the time before Go was released.
Popularity has been on a steady (and natural) decline since pokemania and Go reignited it in a big way.
This. Gen 3-6 were the dark ages. Go introduction brought people back.
Gen 4 and 5. Merchandise nonexistent, liking Pokémon was a great way to get yourself bullied.
gen 8 and 9
they have the worse designs
Gen 8 literally is gen1/2 tier sales.
Sadaly I think it was around the gen 5, a lot o people were hoping a new Pokemon game for the 3DS but Gamefreak released for the normal Nintendo DS
Gen V, ice cream mon and the garbage mon
BW2 is the objective proof that sales =/= quality in this franchise.
I think people forget that Gen7 had ultra sun/moon which honestly was the most fun I had with pokemon since Gen 2 Gold.
Mainly because Lusamine was such a hatefrickable type.
God I love her. Her design is sublime perfection. A hateable, yet loveable and sympathetical character that is so conflicting to players internally it comes off as super gap moe.
It has served my PP well.
I still hate BW not for the gameplay..... the game just felt off .
I really hated the Pokemerica setting and the Pokemon designs are weirdly souless.
>the Pokemon designs are weirdly souless.
I like the legendary for violet.
It's the best I've seen since gen 2.
I don't get why lightning taoist psychic dragon works but it just does.
Why am I thinking splinter from TMNT
>I really hated the Pokemerica setting
Sun and Moon were really good though
>I hated Pokemerica
Colosseum and GoD were both good tbh
I'm honestly surprised USUM did so well as compared to BW2, Emerald, Crystal, Plat. It had the least amount of changes between them (Mantine Minigame, gift totems, haunted house, RR, Necrozma shit, and made Lusamine story worse)
Gen 4 to gen 5, ironically the most beloved games right now. I started with Silver on the GBC and i remember how unpopular the whole franchise was during the mid 2000s. Normies weren't hyped by DP because of the new designs, i can't believe that all these mons are considered some of the best now because nobody liked the starters and Dialga/Palkia, the hate was even more intense than with gen 3.
Gen I, the magnet mon and the pile of purple goo mon
Pokemon has always been fairly popular, but the actual pokemania ended with the start of Gen 3, when most kids moved on to the next big thing, which was Yugioh in my country.
In my case i didn't care less for pokemon until i got a DS and emulated all gen 4 and 5 which i and many others still consider the golden age of the series in terms of quality.
Gen 10 because there won't be a Gen 10
I could be way off but this is the timeline as I understand it...
Gen 1 blew up in popularity because it was the fade at the time. Gen 2 saw a slight drop off but was still riding the original wave of popularity pretty well. Gen 3 was the first major drop in relevancy. The original fanbase was "outgrowing" Pokémon and the fade had passed. Even with the new mechanics, it still felt like more of the same to the average player. Two other things to take into account is that misty was no longer a main stay in the anime and the designs of gen 3 had a bit of a different style to gens 1 and 2. Gen 4 saw a resurgence because Pokémon was now being introduced to a new generation on top of the old diehard fans. It felt refined. The new designs were less "jarring" than gen 3 but kept still had a unique and cool feel to it. Also, I think the card game sold well at this time as well with all of you younger kids getting into Pokémon. Then gen 5 was another drop in popularity. I think it was a similar situation to gen 3. The fan base outgrew Pokémon and there was a general Pokémon burn out. Also, with the internet becoming even more accessible, memes about how "the new Pokémon designs are bad" could spread. Gen 5 was very ambitious in changing Pokémon, but it just wasn't the right time for that. The novelty of 3d Pokémon and mega evolutions was enough for gen 6 to have better sales, but the burn out was still real. Still a recovery. Gen 7 exploded pretty much completely because of Pokémon go. The anime has a good season prior to this helped build the hype for this gen, and some other stuff, but it really was just Pokémon go saving the franchise. Gen 8 was just riding the coat tails of gen 7. It is feeling like a cash grab didn't help, but with Covid and an increased acceptance of man child behavior, it did well enough. Gen 9 will probably do poorly because of burn out of the franchise and the game being underwhelming.
tl;dr
>gen 1
Initial hype
>gen 2
Still riding the trend
>gen 3
Low point due to burn out and aging fan base
>gen 4
Younger fan base and improved game
>gen 5
Lowest point due to burn out and aging fanbase. Innovation compounded this.
>gen 6
Still a low point, but 3D, the anime, and megas helped
>gen 7
Pokemon go resurgence in old and new fans.
>gen 8
Riding the fade and Covid helped
>gen 9
Probably low point due to burn out and bad game.
I'm 31 and I remember losing complete interest in the anime around gen 3, but I liked the game, then I kind of dipped for gen 4 and 5 and came back for gen 6.
Depends on where, I would say right now. After the 2013 or so since sinnoh anime ended. Now I don't think children watch the anime and not much people have a switch as they had a ds, it's not popular, phones won over consoles.
Gen 5 ruined a good streak
I think somewhere between Gen 4 and 5. Not because of the lack of quality, infact those games are probably some of the best in the series. It’s just alot of people were going through that “pokemon is for babies, everything needs to be brown and bloom” phase. Another thing I noticed in my friend group is alot of people only bought one of the ds era games and didn’t pick the series back up until X/Y. Infact Almost all of my friends back into pokemon from X/Y and have bought every game sense. But that might also be because we were becoming adults and had jobs that let us afford games more often.
So basically
>gen 1 kids growing out of pokemon
>now as teenagers, they’re insecure about liking pokemon because “for babies” image at the height of the dudebro bloom era
>now as adults they got back into the series and can afford every game now instead of having to rely on their parents
Genwunner here and Gen 5 has been my favorite since it released.
My condolences
Just based on personal experience, a whole bunch of my friends and people i knew got out of pokemon by gen 5 and came back for x/y with the 3ds. I did play gen5 but didn't like it. to this day that and lets go are the only pokemon games i have never been able to finish. I'd imagine the real low point was when pokemania died out but then again id imagine pokemon popularity has still just kept going up since then. Now its gotta be more popular than ever especially now theyre doing collabs with clothing companies and getting famous popstars making all the music
I think there’s a difference between something being popular within it’s circle and something being popular to people outside of that circle. Like despite Yugioh seemingly being “dead” it still kept getting recording breaking attendance at Yugioh events.
Yugioh is one of the most popular tcgs in the world, it just lost the normalgay appeal. Konami launched the rush duel thing and a new promotional anime in order to make kids care again, since they were worried about the franchise turning into nothing but tournamenthomosexualry, but I think all that shit is still Japan-only.
Platinum was the lowest selling third version, right?
I mean I skipped Platinum after D/P and regretted it for years.
Most people didn’t buy third versions back then, only the autists. But what I didn’t know is that BW2 and USUM did better by volume than Crystal/Emerald/Platinum, which is why they stopped doing just a singular third game. Pokemania had mostly died off around or right after gen 3 came out so it makes sense for the DS era to be the slowest period for the franchise
>W2 and USUM did better by volume than Crystal/Emerald/Platinum, which is why they stopped doing just a singular third game
I wonder if they started doing it with bw because platinum didn't get the sales they wanted so they decided theyd double up on them kek
Crystal was and still is the lowest selling mainline Pokémon with only around 6 million units.
Have to remind to zoomers that biggest selling point on franchise is still merchandises. Games only matters to promotions to next Gen, same goes to early anime series which was biggest impact before Pokemon GO.
>Have to remind to zoomers
thats whos buying all the merch kek
gen 5-6
>HGSS actually flopped
Ouch, guess the meme was real
Gen 3, Zoomers here love that gen but it legit almost killed the franchise
The franchise was nowhere close to dying during gen 3. 16 million sales between Ruby and Sapphire was keeping the GBA afloat more than anything.
The real answer to this question is more complicated than naming a specific gen. The sales declines started happening toward the end of gen 2 for merchandise. You can see the decline in box office revenue for the movies as well. This continued going into gen 3, as well as the series seeing decline of the franchise overall (gen 2 selling worse than gen 1, gen 3 selling worse than gen 2). It was a slow decline over many years. Idk why you morons think one single gen can be attributed to anything here. I don't think we can even name a reason why. You can pinpoint the anime turning into a filler slog for why the franchise declined. You can name the unpopularity of Nintendo as a whole for a reason why the decline happened. You can point at kids wanting to look "mature" and gravitating towards M rated games like GTA and Halo as reasons for the decline. Rival IPs like Digimon and Yugioh might have taken away some of the fans too. Maybe it's a combination of all of these factors and more. The lack of a real agreement in this thread only shows that nobody knows why.
Gen5 is literally the Grabage gen
Anyone that says Gen V wasn't around for the V to VI hype cycle.
I'm an OG. I can tell all you youngins exactly how this shit went.
>1
Insane peak. I don't think there's really been anything like it since. Imagine peak fornite, mcu, and fidget spinners all combined in to one.
>2
It sort of runs together for RBY for me. None of the pokemon were as popular as stuff from RBY though. In retrospect it was basically just a short extension DLC for pokemania
>3
A lot of people fell off here. It was started to be viewed as childish and embarrassing.
>4
About the same as 3.
people fricking HATED the cross gen evos and used them as evidence that the franchise has went to shit and has horrible designs
>5
The bottom. It felt like you were part of a niche fanbase instead of the consoomer monster that it is. No one wanted to admit they liked Pokemon still, it was embarassing, but those days were comfy. The change in art style was highly ridiculed and drove even more people off.
>6
About the same as 5 embarrassment wise but it was starting to gain some steam. They won back over some genwunners with the nostalgia pandering.
>Gen 7
Pokemon Go changed everything. Normies still weren't really buying the games, but it wasn't embarrassing to be playing them anymore. It felt to me like a nice happy medium.
>SwSh
Pokemon completely normalized thanks to Go and the popularity of the Switch.It is somehow more popular than ever despite the people who were there in the rough years becoming increasingly disenfranchised. Souless consoomers have taken over the fanbase.
There's a Pokemon thread on /vr/ right now where another anon also talks about how gen 5 was the point when the original genwun generation had finally grown out of its "Pokemon is for babies" teenage years.
Late gen 4/gen 5 is when it ACTUALLY became acceptable to like Pokemon again in the west. Not gen 6.
>Late gen 4/gen 5 is when it ACTUALLY became acceptable to like Pokemon again in the west. Not gen 6.
Seems to be an acceptable line, yeah.
Also an OG. What you said is quite accurate. Go Pokémania of 2016 was only a quarter of what Gen 1 Pokémania was.
The first half of Gen 2 was certainly still riding the hype, that latter half is basically what
said.
Gen 3 was a low point due to combination of that, the soft reboot to the series, and the hard reboot with connectivity to the point that some people looking back claim it to be the first dexcut, which it was, not to the extent of what it is now and why people hate it.
Gen 4 picked up popularity during DP, but never got to full normie levels of mainstream.
Gen 5 was another soft reboot. Combine that with
and you can see why the lowest point is contested between it and Gen 3.
To me, the happy medium was Gen 4, not 7, but that could be my opinion on the latter as a game being not as favorable.
Somewhere after gen 3 came out, by that point the anime had become a repetitive piece of shit that only became worse and worse
Later the G4 games came out and killed all mainstream appeal left
Then Pokémon GO brought it back from its grave and it became normie
I think the reason why many people screech gen 5 here is because people here are core fans compared to the normies.
Gen 3 lost a lot of the casual fans, but I believe that gen 5 lost a lot of the core fans.
I still remember seeing watchdog and decided the first time to just skip a generation. Many pokemons just looked overdiseigned. Some characters looked straight out of yugioh zexal.
Also the new dex was too much, with many designs being quite weak or copies of gen 1 pokemons.
I loved the gen 4 dex because it gave many shitmons new evolutions and even some pre-evos. Thereby making the dex feel "conected" to the previous gen.
Everyone bought ruby and Sapphire despite all the negativity surrounding it. In my school everyone also bought Black/white when it came out probably because those kids that grew up on the original games finally got over their pokemon is uncool phase. Gen 4 I don't remember anyone playing Pokemon much so that would be my pick, that feels like when a lot of people actively decided not to buy as opposed to gen 3 where it was the next thing immediately following pokemania.
I'm happy that we can all agree that gen 5 is still shit.
Gen 6
XY didn't get the retroactive love than BW got, and that's despite ORAS coming out that time
>He wasn't around when X Y was airing
>XY didn't get the retroactive love than BW got
It didn't need "retroactive love" because it was already loved on release you newbie.
Gen 6 is the correct answer because 3DS flopped compared to even the GBA
see
>doesn't realize 3ds didn't sell over 80 million
It flopped anon
End of Gen 4, beginning of Gen 5.
Thanks a lot, you bastards.
Did people at that time even like Gen 5's story or were they too busy letting Garbador and Vanilluxe rent free? Genuinue curious considering it's story been sucked off in recent years
That was how I saw it. Butthurt over ice cream and trash bags that nobody cared about the rest of the game.
Everybody but genwunners liked Gen 5, the Gen 5 hate you see in this board only appeared around the ORAS hype cycle.
>genwunners voted with their wallets and now the franchise is like this
I always knew genwunners were the lowest life form
Everyone took the whole PETA plot as the joke it is and nobody liked the new designs.
Gen V was leaked very early. So it kind of went through cycles. Everyone hated the story and narrative at first because leakers just spedrun through the game and everyone seemed worried about their Pokemon. It didn't help that the plot kind of asks for a return of following Pokemon and they plain didn't do it. (This was actually a bigger deal back then) After a while, the leakers went back and actually played it and were the OG Gen-5 gays because they liked the story and the fact that Pokemon seemed to have one.
Then the game came out stateside, people spedran, hated it, and cared more about Pokemon not being in and odd designs. After a while, they grew to like it.
B2W2 made people appreciate it a lot more too.
In terms of everything, I remember things similar to this
. Pokemon was unpopular with kiddies, but people who grew up on it appreciated that the characters seemed aged up and they tried something different. I was 18 at that time and starting college.
I remember really liking the idea of having all new pokemon on a new region that wasn't Japanese-inspired, made sense to me and gave me a similar feel to exploring the franchise for the first time, not knowing what kind of pokemon I would find. You could get your old mons in postgame so really it was at least better than the dexcut fiasco we currently have going.
I wish GO had never come out.
It was ironic
Adults picked up on childrens/early teens that played pokemon and then all ended up searching for the same mons they shatted on years ago on the streets
The damage began the moment it was found out that the day-night cycle was removed alltogether in gen.3
End of Gen 2 and start of Gen 3 when Pokemania ended was when the biggest dip occurred.
Right after HGSS was the lowest overall point, which is sad given how good Gen 5 is when you actually play it (having similar range of shitmon and cool as Gen 1 just without as much nostalgia now) and weren't the childish people back during release who hated its regional dex use or the childish people now who try and emulate those people to seem like their not super zoomers. Though its anime is by far the lowest point for it.
Gen 6 started similar but improved anime, ORAS and GO at 11th hour pulled it up. It's start was also with the last wave of "Pokemon is for babies" thing in any sizeable amount, was basically 3 for the kids who started with the corresponding Gen who had it seen as cool again 3 gens latter (One ending late gen 4, 2nd ending late gen 5 and this one dying a bit earlier but still latter half of Gen 6).
And now over the last few years we've kinda been brought back into late Pokemania popularity and stayed there.
>The only female Pikachus are the cosplay Pikachus
Did they forget that Regular Pikachu's gender ratios are 50% male and 50% female, why is all the Regular Pikachus male?