I wanted to reply to your post, so here we go.
First of all, regarding the Entralink Missions. Well, fair enough. While I did them and there were some others who also did them, I don't think they ever were
that popular. It would be interesting to know how many actually tried them, but I guess we'll never know. There's one thing I thought about. The fact that they were replaced with the Funfest Missions in the sequels might show that they weren't that popular after all? Just a theory though.
Now, to the big part. HG/SS and
why i hate them several things I didn't like about them that you did. Now, since they are my very least favorite games in the series, I do have a negative bias towards most things surrounding them which probably affects my views a bit, I'll admit that. Anyway, let's go.
1. Kanto. Yes, let's forget about G/S/C. I don't want to remember them anyway. While HG/SS did some small things to improve upon Kanto, it just wasn't enough. Restoring old areas such as Viridian Forest, Seafoam Islands or Cerulean Cave did next to nothing for me. Cinnabar Island was still nerfed, but at least it had awesome music. More trainers means nothing when they are still at too low levels and you can't rebattle them efficiently. The Gyms still lacked motivation for beating them, and the puzzles didn't do a lot in my eyes. As for the rival, I have always had a hard time caring for him as well as his story and character development. I think his character development is simply too little, too late. A lot of it also happens off-screen which is terrible as it is the kind of thing you want to see in a game. I prefer most other rivals over him. As for the Safari Zone, I'll take about it under its own point.
Having good training spots would have been great, as would a better level curve, or rather a level curve at all as Kanto was way too open and not linear enough which meant they couldn't have proper level scaling, for wild Pokemon and trainers alike. For example, there are level 19 Raticate outside of Celadon City when you have beaten a guy with a level 50 Dragonite, there are Pidgey at level 2-4 in the Routes around the Gym where the leader have a level 60 Pidgeot. The final areas in the games didn't have much to offer either. Both Cerulean Cave and Mt. Silver barely reached level 50 in terms of wild Pokemon, which is unacceptable.
What I'm critizizing HG/SS for is not the problems of G/S/C, but rather the fact that HG/SS failed at improving upon most if not all of the problems with the originals.
2. Battle Frontier / New areas around Cianwood. I love Battle Frontiers. The ones in Emerald and Platinum were a lot of fun. But I think that copypasting the Platinum Frontier to HG/SS is one of the worst things the series has ever done. Why would I want to play through the same Frontier twice more? HG/SS didn't offer a whole lot new in terms of new strategies to try out either, most things could already be done in Platinum. I don't mind them copypasting Battle facilities when it is just a single facility (such as the X/Y Maison to OR/AS), but a whole Frontier is not okay. Heck, OR/AS offered far more new things to do in the Maison (mainly with the new Megas) while HG/SS had almost nothing. HG/SS simply doesn't deserve credit for the Frontier when Platinum is the game that had it first and deserves the credit for it. I think it is very fair for HG/SS to not get any credit for a feature they simply copypasted from a better game.
As for the new areas around Cianwood, they suffer from the same problems as Kanto. Nice try, but far from enough. I don't know about everyone else, but I explored those areas as quickly as I could when I played HG/SS, "post-game" is the last word I'd use to describe them. There weren't exactly much to do there either, though I did like the music and catching the Hoenn mascot legendaries was cool.
3. Mt. Silver and Red. I talked about Mt. Silver a little already, the problem is that it has Pokemon at way too low levels, no trainers apart from Red, and it is a pain to navigate due to its idiotic structure and needing a ton of HMs. I liked it better in G/S/C where it felt more structured and better executed. Simply, it was more linear and straight-forward in the originals, save for the first room.
As for Red himself, I don't really care much for him. I wouldn't have minded him being at super-high levels if the games actually had some place to level up, now they don't which just makes it unfair. I had to trade over strong Pokemon from D/P/P in order to beat him, which shouldn't be the case. I definitely prefer the superbosses in other games, notably B2/W2, which also have great training spots and good chances to reach the same levels as those bosees. I also don't like Red's personality, or rather the lack of it. I don't mind the games having silent protagonists, but if you lift out the protagonist and keep them silent even as an NPC, you get a character lacking character, simply put. I feel the same way when facing Red in the PWT and Battle Tree as well, he just isn't interesting as a boss character. Or as a character overall. That's why I don't like how they had to include him in any games outside of R/B/Y and FR/LG in the first place.
4. Safari Zone. Unlike you, I have never been a huge fan of the Safari Zones. Except OR/AS, that one got it right. The rest are just too luck-based for my liking. The customization feature was once more, a neat idea with a mediocre execution (which I think can be said for far too many things about HG/SS, sadly). I did like that they removed the step limit though. The issue is that there aren't that many interesting Pokemon to find here during the main game, and during the post-game, some of the waiting times are just insane. I'll admit that I never fully understood how the Safari Zone worked (for example, it gave me Solrock on one of my games when I hadn't met the requirements to find them) but having to wait hundreds of days just to find a single Pokemon is not okay. I'd say anything over 40 days is completely unacceptable in every way.
5. Other non-fun content. I think we need to define the terms here first. There's post-game, and there's content, but those aren't necessarily the same. Post-game are things that can only be done after beating the game, while content are things that can be done at (almost) any time. Some content in the games are post-game only, but not everything. Minigames for instance can often be done at any time but I personally always wait with completing them until I have beaten the main game.
With that out of the way, let's go. I didn't like the Pokeathlon, so take me on if you dare. I thought it was poorly executed, if the touch screen doesn't respond to your moves in something that's completely touch-based, how are you supposed to enjoy that? It also felt like the opponents ganged up on me far too often. The goals were also very unclear to me (in the game), I had to try several things before finally understanding what I was supposed to do in order to get the Trainer Card upgrade I wanted. That said, it isn't my least favorite minigame as I prefer it over the Sinnoh contests, Poffin baking and Voltorb Flip, but that's it. Gen 5 was the one that really got everything right when it comes to minigames in my opinion.
Then the following Pokemon. Unpopular opinion which I have stated before, but I don't like this feature. Don't feel like giving a long explanation right now and I dislike repeating myself too much, I have explained my thoughts on it before
here if anyone should be interested (I guess not since almost everyone loves this feature lol). So, just a short explanation for now. I think this feature is the single most useless and overrated feature in the whole series, it adds nothing to the gameplay, it is poorly executed and slows down the games. It is also my least favorite feature in the entire series to date. It did not help me "connect" with my Pokemon in any way, Amie/Refresh does that a thousand times better than this crap.
I wasn't too fond of Voltorb Flip either, while there was a bit of strategy involved, it was still too luck-based for me. But the main problem isn't the game itself, it is the fact that you can't buy coins, forcing you to play the dumb game of you want a Porygon, a TM, or whatever you needed them for.
Other things? Yes. The Shiny leaves was nothing special either, it took like 20 minutes to complete and since I didn't like the following Pokemon to start with, that made it even worse. That's all I could think of though.
6. The merits of HG/SS. Even with all of this, I don't hate HG/SS. I wouldn't even say I dislike them, they are my least favorite Pokemon games but that doesn't mean I dislike them. There are actually a few small things I like about them, but I'm saving them for future posts in the
right thread.
I wanted to enjoy HG/SS. I really tried to. But I couldn't. Their massive gameplay flaws and poorly executed features just got in the way every time. Completing the Pokedex in them was the least fun I have ever had completing a Pokedex. I tried to find other things to do afterwards, but I just couldn't find anything that was either fun or lasted longer than a few days at best. I'm dismissing their merits simply because I can't find any.
That's it, I think. Now, this is all just my opinions (with some facts mixed in). If you disagree with me (I guess most people do since HG/SS are videly loved and popular)... that's actually all fine. Opinions are like that.
This took a while to write. But I needed to do this, this fandom sometimes forces me into venting my thoughts on a given subject. This is the second time it has happened here on Smogon this year. Interestingly, the last time it happened was also because of you,
stage7_4. I guess the two of us simply just don't agree on certain things. But that's actually okay, I'm glad to be able to participate in these kinds of discussions sometimes.
I think that was all I had to say about this. For now, at least. I'll vent the rest of my complaints about HG/SS at some unknown point in the future.
