All Mainline Pokemon Games Ranked | Goldenrod Podcast #74 

I think Conor makes a good point about bringing in new players. The advert about bringing back starter Pokémon is likely to bring back people who dropped off the series. That and Pokédex fillers. 11:24

QOTP: Hopefully the Champion Teir is next because I want to know - If you were a champion, what region would you be the independent champion of (not world champion, gotta conquer a region first). What would be you team, and which would be you signature Psuedo? Since all proper champions tend to have a Psuedo with exception of Blue (who was a champion for all of five minutes lol) and Red (who clearly didn't take the gig and prefers snowy mountains and solitude).

Leaf Green/Fire Red - the better Kanto experience. Might be playing these again. Still debating. We'll see once I beat Emerald. Diamond and Pearl - I'm so mad I lost my Platinum because I hate these games, but will play them to set up for a better experience in Heart Gold and Soul Silver, meaning trading over mons to limit the grinding experience so I can actually face Red at the end since he's not a higher level with as many options to grind up to face him as the originals. Way to improve Gen 2...grumble. B/W(2) - I'm mad I lost my Black and White versions. I really want to replay them so I'll probably buckle down and try to find one...somewhere. The sequels were the first games to actually top my love for Emerald. I've enjoyed replaying them, looking forward to one more go at it in the future as I venture my way through the generations. I like to say that gen 5 is gens 1 and 2 done better and right. X/Y - These are probably the easiest games to replay through, but I love running through Kalos. It's so much fun, it's one of my favorite regions, but I definitely understand every complaint about it.

Let's Go - I liked them, but the catching mechanic gets old as I'm just catching a bunch of mons that I'm never going to used in order to raise the level of the six that I am using so that I'm not solely relying on Pikachu or Eevee. The overall sprites makes me feel like I'm actually in a Pokemon World and on an adventure, but I could have either used less catching or don't hender the experience gained form the battles. At least it has battles. Sword and Shield - I still love just the base game of these, I haven't done the DLC but I plan to because I wanted to face Leon, whos' my favorite champion, with my ideal final team. So I'll need the option to assemble all my big hitters for one last go at it. The anime also motivates me to keep battling Leon as that final battle in the show is still so hype for me. Maybe this will finally convince me to get these pokemon bank or whatevers to carry my mons forward. (I actually forgot aboout the villain plot in these games because it's so unnecessary and crammed in that it's worst than all the cut scenes and hand holding in Alola) BDSP - I go back and forth on these games. Mainly it's the following sprites and how they don't allow me to have a Gliscor during the main story. It's one of my favorite ground types and I can't use it. But it did finally make me like using Lucario as it gave it Meteor Mash. The following mons are okay, but the scale for some of them is laughable. I like the challenging battles, especially the elite four and Cynthia, but I wish the games looked like Legends much like I wished Legends had some of the battles like BDSP. Legends Arceus - Beautiful game, not my favorite. I get too bored with it after the initial play through and I never played to the Volvo conclusion because I already don't like catching legendaries, I wasn't going to go through the exhausting effort just to have one last final battle and to meet Arceus. Tried to play it a second time...got bored around the Arcanine story, so I'm not returning to this game, I need battles and a reason to build and test a team, not just catching mons.

Hmm, I've finally ranked them. This is gonna vary with a lot of people, but this is how I enjoy these games. Sorry, not sorry. S - Platinum A - Emerald, B/W(2), Ultra S/M B - Sword/Shield, Sca/Vio, ORAS, X/Y, Leaf Green/Fire Red, Sun/Moon, B/W, Let's Go C - BDSP, Legends D - Ruby/Sapphire, Red/Blue/Yellow, Gold/Silver/Crystal, Diamon/Pearl

About BDSP/Diamond & Pearl ranking.......... So if it has the cool champion, non-linear story, great starters, and some of the best legendaries in all of Pokemon, how does game speed drop it to C? I feel like it should be atleast ranked as a B due to the fact that it ticks all boxes except speed of the battle animations, which were made to be much faster in BDSP. Also, I think it should jump up as the underground had wild Pokémon, which the main Diamond and Pearl did not do. Plus they had mining for evolution stones, and more! The story is pretty cool and they added a ton of outfit customization in BDSP replacing the casino. For context, Gen 4 to me is the one of the best Generations. I am a big fan of the Sinnoh Region so I am super bias about my comments LOL. I loved Sinnoh because it's the game we got soooooooo many additional evolutions for older pokemon! Magnezone, Togekiss, Weavile, Magmortar, Lickylicky, Tangrowth, Rhyperior, Electivire, Yanmega, Leafeon, Glaceon, Gliscor, Mamoswine, Porygon-Z, and Gallade. Great listen fellas! Keep up the awesome work :D

I disagree with the argument on Crystal. Aside from the Suicune/Eusine story, it also added animated sprites and the Female player character. It also took full advantage of the Gameboy Colour hardware, being a Colour only game. Don't forget, Gold and Silver were also GB compatible.

Sca/Vio - the graphics of the game are terrible with the glitchiness and etc, but I still love playing and exploring this world. Looking forward to the final DLC. I've replayed this so many times. If the trainer was more customizable with their clothing I'd really appreciate it more. Also, can I not play as a ten year old anymore? lol Come on, let me at least have a teenager again like X/Y Red/Blue/Yellow - avoiding the nostalgia, these games are super easy for me to just playthrough but any game that's gen 3 down are hard for me to sit through and play because I can't take the slow pace and grinding anymore. Too old for it, don't have the patience anymore. That was my childhood and that's where those hours remain lol Gold/Silver/Crystal - while I finally just played through gen 2 where I was able to enjoy it. I still had to restrain myself to four main mons, and since my end game was Red, I had to make sure they could handle him while being ten levels under because I wasn't grinding to be on par. I did it, and it felt nice getting that victory over him, but it wasn't as satisfying as I'd like it be. So I still don't like gen 2 lol Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald - I'm currently playing Emerald again. I will not touch Ruby or Sapphire because I don't like the splitting of the evil teams. When I get to the remakes it bugs me to not be against both teams in one game but they look and play well enough that I can bypass that gripe. I can't do it with the originals. Emerald remains one of my favorite games, I love the Hoehn region, minus all the water routes lol I can only run into Tentacoool and Wingull so many times before I'm like...why don't the other water types surface? There's so many, why must the be restrained to fishing and diving. (Uh, Gen 2 we get a 8th gym of Dragon Types and a Champion "Dragon Type" master...while I don't like Wallace, Gen 2 did it...too...even if Lance is more a flying type master and needs to stop lying to us)

ORAS - the best remakes, you'll never change my mind about this so don't even try gen 2 stands lol I'm sorry, these has the better experience for Pokemon Games minus mons following you but given how the fumbled that moving forward, it's fine that it's not included here. I wonder if I would have actually done the Battle Frontier if it was included, but these games are not the peak for me but they're right up there with Platinum. These games gave me hope that BDSP failed to deliver lol Sun/Moon (Ultra) - My favorite region, my favorite gimmicks with Z-Moves. I just wished the player character had emotions! lol looking at that blank expression in cut scene is the only thing that brings the cut scenes down for me. I don't mind the Tutorial Island. The games are rightfully challenging, and the extension that comes from the Ultra places them as my third favorite games even if I wished we could keep the Lusamine motivations from Sun and Moon in the Ultra games.

Legends Arceus missing on one aspect.....battling. As someone who loves Pokemon battling, the game was not great for that.

I'd just swap your A and S tiers lol and drop PLA altogether I really didn't like the noble Pokemon mechanism where you throw the crap at the Pokemon I couldn't get past heatran lol maybe it's a skill level thing... I only like remakes when I haven't played the OG for example if JKR rewrote HP and it's the same story with small changes I'd get bored of reading the same story again despite the difference

13 reasons why BDSP are the WORST remakes of all time: 1. Faithfulness: Unlike other remakes, BDSP literally copy/pastes 90% of diamond/pearl(2006). You cannot copy almost everything from a 2006 game.. (Remember its a remake not a remaster!). Almost everything is copied: All dialogs, the storyline, the chibi art style, the national dex, old pokemon encounters and even the Poketch were copy & pasted to this game. Pokemon games have been improved in the past years and had many quality of life changes like 3D art style, overworld Pokemon encounters and reusable TMs. None of these changes were adapted to the game which is just sad. This game is too faithful and faithful sounds more like a excuse for lazyness. 2. Not-Platinum-Based: So they copy & pasted 90% from the old Sinnoh game but not based on Platinum? Diamond & Pearl had several weaknesses and Platinum fixed many of them and included many Quality of Life changes. Here are some Platinum improvements over Diamond/Pearl: It extends the storyline with additional content, new dialogs, new characters like Charon and a new map Distortion world (loved it). The rival was a bit too weak in Diamond/Pearl which was fixed in Plat. The Poketch has a reverse Button. It has the battle frontier. And finally: the Sinnoh dex which was baaad in Dia/Pearl was fixed. The bad sinnoh dex in dia/pearl has only very few Fire Pokemon (very weird). Gym leaders were forced to use weird mons in the main game like Electric gym leader using Octillery or IceType gym leader using Medicham (WTF? Despite Sinnoh having enough Ice/Electric mons) and also many sinnoh mons were restricted to the postgame. Thats means many of the favourite sinnoh mons cannot be used in your team for the main story. But Platinum fixed this issue and created a NEW sinnoh dex which fixed all these issues which made the main story like a sinnoh game. ALL of these great changes of Platinum where NOT included in BDSP. This means BDSP uses the OLD sinnoh dex, OLD dialogs, OLD storyline, NO new character like Charon, NO distortion world and NO battle frontier. That makes BDSP a worse Sinnoh remake than Platinum which was released in 2008. (Imagine a 2008 DS game of the same Region beats you in ALL aspects. WTF) 3. EXP-Share & Friendship-System: One of the most hated features is the EXP-Share system which often leads to WAY more exp than in the past games. In my opinion, the EXP-Share is not too bad. BUT diamond/pearl were not designed to be played with the new EXP-Share system. So if you include an EXP-Share system, you have to increase all levels of the pokemon (from opponent). But they didnt which makes the difficulty of this game too easy.Basically, my whole team was too oveleveled. And the friendship-system is the worst luck-based system i ever saw. A feature that increases the Critical hit-chance,removes paralysis, lets me dodge 100% accurate moves and even lets me survive moves with 1HP. WTF did you smoke gamefreak? And the worst is that, you cannot make any of these optional. Because of that many players who love to do a nuzzlock in Sinnoh, prefer the old DS games. 4. No Innovation: This game not only copy & pastes the majority of its content, it adds nothing new to the game. Lets review some good remakes: HeartGold/SoulSilver (HG/SS) were Gen 2 remakes and included some storyline from Crystal and added many new stuff like the pokeathlon, battle frontier (from sinnoh), gen 1 map/storyline, a complete national dex and the pokewalker. HG/SS were not copy & pasted, but actually remade the game and added good new stuff. Also Alpha ruby&omega saphire (ORAS) have new changes like new art-style , new designs for Team magma/aqua, new Mega-forms, new Primal forms, changes to dialogs and storyline and the complete national dex. BDSP on the other hand does not provide any kind of major change in the game which makes this game really boring. It does have a new Underground which has overworld pokemon, but that is nothing special for 2022 and the ramanas park was neat but nothing too exciting. 5. Underground/Super-Contest: The old underground allowed to create your own living room with furnitures and set traps to troll friends online. Both were removed for a statue system which is really boring. Collecting statues and the effects of the statues are really disapointing. The Super-Contest used to be a fun-mode where you had many different options and varities and had to have good reflexes to do the correct moves at the correct time. Now all you have to do is Press A at the correct time and use 1 attack. That makes this mode so boring and disapointing. I mean, was it really that hard to let the player press like 4 different buttons instead of just 'A'?? 6. Art-Style: Many of us expected a modern review of Sinnoh in a 3D human like Art-style. But they decided to go for the Chibi-Art-Style. Everyone has different tastes but in my opinion the Chibi-Art-Style ruins many serious moments of the story line of this game, especially vs team galactic. It feels like all the emotions of the characters were removed. The reason why it was used in Diamond/Pearl was because of the limited hardware. In my opinion the Chibi-Art-Style waas the wrong decision and does not suit a switch game at all. 7. Only Gen 4: BDSP has a national dex which includes the pokemon from Gen 1-4 which is basically the same as Diamond/Pearl. As a player who would have loved to see at least some Pokemon from Gen 5-8 in Sinnoh, i am very disappointed. At least some Pokemon post Gen4, or some new forms or at least add Sylveon in this game. Not even mega-forms were included in this game. The fact that 95% of the megas are from Gen1-4 and the underground being the perfect place to grind the mega-stones, makes this decision even more disapointing. The reason why diamond/pearl was limited to Gen 1-4 was because there werent any other new pokemon. The reason why BDSP limited the game to Gen 1-4 is because of lazyness.. 8. PVP: On of the worst things in this game is everything arround PVP. The worst disrespect a main series pokemon game can get, is when GameFreak calls that all the competitive tournaments including the world championship will not take place in BDSP (WTF?). Unlike Sword/Shield, you have no option to search for PVP matches which makes it way harder to find battles. But the worst thing is the grind for a PvP team: TMs are not reusable (WHY?!). For some important TMs like Earthquake, you have to grind for 80BP (WTF. Thats a lot of Grind). Also you cannot catch pokemon with hidden abilities except those from poke radar. To get the hidden ability you have to grind for the ability patch for 200BP (WTF. Grind competitive to create a competitive. Nice system). By putting important PVP items behind such ridiculously high grind walls, it makes creating a PVP team disgusting. 9. Events: The events were also copy & pasted from Diamond/Pearl. Same Shaymin event, same Darkrai event. And other events are only accesible if you bought other main series pokemon game (Why..). And finally some garbage "events" which include some useless statues. Meanwhile, the 3 year old SW/SH getting better and innovative events like new PVP cups/tournaments and some legendary shinies. In my opinion the events in BDSP are disapointing. 10. Bugs/Glitches: Holy Moly! This game had so many bugs and glitches! You dont even need hacks, when the game itself has to many glitches. Many of them where completely broken. Many Pokemon clone glitches and item dupe glitches ruined the game. You could even get infinity money, create your own shinies (WTF), make your pokemon 6IV and let any Pokemon learn any move. I used to be in a discord for trading in BDSP and because of the glitches, the trade market was only about getting shiny 6IVs etc. Not to forget to mention the soft locks which made you restart the whole game which can happen for example in the ice gym. Usually every games has a few bugs. But this one had too many and too many game breaking glitches. A very hyped game like this shouldnt be developed by a 3rd party company.. But Gamefreak had other plans.. 11. Controls: The controls of this game feel weird and uncomfortable. Characters move in a grid which looks so weird during the storyline. The pokemon who follow me often block me in a bad way. The underground has many inivisible walls which makes moving in some rooms horrible. And finally the control with the cycle are the worst. The cycle in pokemon games are a beloved feature but in this game.. It feels so uncomfortable moving with the cycle, I sometimes even prefer walking. 12. Standards: A 2021 game should adapt the standards from the latest games (Sword 2019). The BDSP-standard isnt nearly as good as Sword/Shield. Many items, many attack moves, renewable TMs, dynamax, new pokemon, old moves without heart scales, more customization,max Raids or ranked battle stadium. None of the mentioned were adapted into this game -> BIG Downgrade for 2021 pokemon standards! 13. Price: Dia/pearl/Platinum: 40$ and Copy/Paste BDSP with Bugs:60$ -> Bruh.. Conclusion: It feels like GameFreak didnt want to do a Sinnoh remake but wanted to milk some money by releasing the highly demanded Sinnoh remake. The fact that, they hired a 3rd party company who never developed a major game, only supports this theory. Not forget to mention that, BDSP had a giant day one patch which was essential to enjoy the game. The fact that they released Legends Arceus almost 1-2 months after BDSP release also supports the theory, that they didnt care at all for this remake. Because of the release of Legends Arceus, the hiring of ILCA, the amount of glitches, the boring events, the exclusion of VGC, the 0 Innovation in this game and the fact that the majority of the game is copy & paste of a 2006 game (Dia/Pearl) which is worse than a 2008 Game (Platinum), makes this game the worst remake of all time in my opinion.