Gen 6 is my absolute favorite. Y and Alpha Sapphire were my first two games, and they're my favorites to go back and play. Surprisingly, I prefer AS over Y. Honestly, there's more to go back and do, and XY just felt very... serious, and heartfelt, and shit, and then ORAS is just like "Woo, we made this cool game with funny stuff, have fun!" The music is bouncier, the story is much less bleak and ominous, the visuals are brightly colored, everything feels cheery and full of life.

Gen 3 is my second favorite. I think FRLG, specifically LG in my case, since it's the one I played, is the ultimate Kanto experience. Gen 3 is significantly harder than Gen 6, obviously, but it's a ton of fun regardless.

In my opinion, Gen 1 is meh. It's hard to get into, it doesn't feel very rewarding, and a lot of the support for it seems to be through nostalgia-tinted glasses. No genders, no abilities, no breeding, no double battles, no held items, incorrect type matchups, weird glitches from the badly programmed battle system, terrible AI, everything just feels like a proof of concept rather than an actual game. I'd rather just play FRLG.

Gen 2 really feels like it's getting the hang of what it's supposed to be for me. It genuinely seems like they've started to really get what they're doing. Unfortunately, it's really hard to get into, because older games have a shitload of grinding to do. You get the EXP Share a little under halfway through the game, if you consider the heavily extended post-game to be the second half. So yeah, it's, uh, tough, which makes me feel bad, because it's damn solid.

Gen 4 is like Gen 2 but wonky, especially for DPPl. I'm not sure why, they just feel kind of... strange, I can't really explain it. They're a bit off-pace, and the progression doesn't feel good at all. Thankfully, HGSS is incredibly good, although I've only played the second half of the game since I got it pre-owned and didn't want to toss the save. Everything feels just as open and alive as ORAS, and I live for it.

I hate Gen 5. I'm not afraid to say it. I have played Black pretty much all the way through, and I did not enjoy it. The legendary encounters feel really separated from the actual story, the dungeons are the most infuriating in the series, and the grinding takes fucking forever. You will very quickly end up crutching on a single Pokemon for the entire run. And of course, we can't not talk about the goddamn "only Unova Pokemon until post-game" bullfuck. Nobody liked that, Nintendo. Apparently, since they changed that, B2W2 are a bit better, but I'm worried it's not going to be worth it to try and play them, because BW sucked.

Gen 7 is complicated. I really liked Sun, and how off-beat in a good way it felt from the rest of the series without completely leaving its roots. My only real complaint is that Z-Moves were kind of boring, and felt like a serious downgrade to the actually exciting Mega Evolutions. Unlike Sun, Ultra Moon was hot garbage. The story was neat, other than them completely nuking Lusamine's character and ret-gone-ing the clever Ultra Beast missions with Looker and a surprise guest star from the fucking Battle Frontier in Pokemon Emerald of all people, but the rest of the game felt like an enormous downgrade to SM. The difficulty was spiked for no goddamn reason, making every battle feel like a chore, a bunch of unfitting Pokemon from other regions were shoe-horned in to try and make up for people complaining about the National Dex's disappearance instead of just actually adding the fucking National Dex, and it all just felt like they tried to pander to a bunch of disappointed fans at once and failed to achieve any of those things. Let's Go was awesome, and despite all the complaints, it was a great fucking game and I loved every bit of it.

Gen 8 is weird. Like, I like it, but I'd rather play most of the other games. The Wild Area was cool for about 5 minutes, until you realized that it's just a long route that gatekeeps Pokemon until you get certain badges or wait for the goddamn weather to change of all things, including locking a ton of fan-favorites behind a weather condition that for some stupid fucking reason just doesn't happen until after you beat the gym challenge. The gym challenge thing itself was kinda weird, and it felt like they were trying to make it different for different's sake without making sure it was actually more fun. Hop was a boring rival, Bede was the most obnoxious little shit, Marnie was cool but underused and underdeveloped, and Chairman Rose got about half a minute of underwhelming villainy at the very end of the game. Also, the whole "tournament" thing replacing the Elite Four/Champion was dumb. Please do not replace the ultimate final challenge that's tough but exciting with a dumb boss rush of every previous moderately acceptable fight, thank you. The DLCs didn't really meet my expectations, as they were hyped up to be really cool, and a way to catch a bunch of new Pokemon, but doing so didn't actually feel very rewarding, and the only other stuff you got was short stories that were only vaguely interesting and about 79 different obnoxious fetch quests nobody actually wanted.

Gen 9... well, I don't really have enough experience to say one way or another. I've played a little bit of Scarlet, but I had to reset because of NSO problems, and I haven't played again since. It felt really strange, and I really hated how your fucking dragon motorcycle controlled, especially since it gave you a ton of really tough platforming to get random fucking items in the wild with this god-awful physics and collision. The new Pokemon are fine, and the gym leaders are neat, but it's open to the point where I was just wandering around going "Uh I am catching things I think I am doing this right?"

So yeah, that's my rant about Pokemon. If you actually read this whole thing, I am shocked and impressed.