Pokémon Generation 1 and 2. They story, gameplay, and mechanics are concise and not hand-hold-y, the designs are the ones I grew up with, they can easily be played on a phone emulator and have so many rom hacks that I never will totally experience everything they have to offer

Whichever generation was in the Pokémon game for the original Gameboy color. The one where there was a red, green, and yellow version of the same game.
That’s the only real relationship I have with pokemon, because it was such a great game. So great that I loved the game and played it on an emulator, as I didn’t have a Gameboy.

I haven’t played every generation but imo generation V (Pokemon Black/White) were the most interesting to me. It’s the sweet spot between the older clunkier games and the more modern ones.

Gen 1, because of nostalgia

I only played red. It kind of sucked but we had almost no other forms of entertainment back then

• Palworld and Temtem.

If I’m answering the question as given, Gen 2 because it was the first games I owned, so that’s certainly nostalgia speaking. However, over the years it’s just so obvious that Nintendo/Gamefreak refused to evolve the series and the variants of the genre are the better games.

Gen two; the games were so damn good. Thank you Iwata

I think two for me. In my opinion, it had the best animated sprites (later animated sprites were sometimes the entire sprite bouncing which felt lazy to me). I stopped playing after gen four though, so I’m definitely missing some.

Gen 2, Crystal. Was my favourite. I found the character selection and graphical upgrade was really nice. Gen 2 includes the previous game world. Collecting all the badges again was special.

But I played Gen 1, Blue the most. The missingno trick was a bunch of fun and it was my first gameboy game.

Edit: my friend said Soul Silver is peak and sun/moon is a close 2nd place.

Gen 2 was best, because of that miltank that they nerfed in later versions.

Five, because it was the only time the series innovated, and they got punished for it. Sequel games instead of re-releases of games I’ve already played, a brave story, and easily the series’ musical peak. It was the best Pokemon had ever looked, played and sounded.

We will never see it again.

I want to say 4 because that’s the one I started with but, realistically, gen 5 was the best. It had so many features:

• Animated sprites (they look better than the 3d models and I’ll never get over it)
• An actual story
• Used only the new pokemon for the regional dex
• Very cool abilities like Zoroarks

Gen 1 had a lot of design issues: The special stat is overpowered, too many pokemon were poison type, move diversity was so poor that some types were just useless, and there were a lot of glitches.

Recent generations also have design issues: The story holds your hand every step of the way, characters are more detailed but less expressive, each generation has a gimmick that gets abandoned in the very next game, and there’s somehow a lot of glitches again!

Personally, my sweet spot is gen 4, but gens 3 and 5 are pretty solid too.

The OG 150, with special shout out to the weed smoking cat from one of the newer gens.

specifically the pokemon, or the games ins aid generation.

gen 5 is imo objectively the best generation in terms of game content (virtually every game after black 2/white 2 has less content)

aa for pokemon designs, slight edge to gen 3, with 4 and 7 not particularly far behind.