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[Hide] (3.9MB, 2160x3840) >>7874
>Not only do pseudos have higher BST but actually getting one requires more work than a beast legendary. You can start encountering the beasts the moment you reach Ecruteak City IIRC whereas you don't even get a whiff of Larvitar's existence until you're at Mt. Silver
You might have a point here if the beasts were normal legendaries, but they're roamers. There's a reason many guides say to save your Master Ball for the roaming legendary if the game has one. Even worse, they have Roar, which means even if you get a trapper, they can just Roar you away and the game counts that as if you selected the Run command, meaning they're gone forever. GameFAQs has a whole guide on everything you need to do to get around Raikou/Entei's Roar in FR/LG and it is a lot of fucking work. Catching and even training Larvitar is almost trivial in comparison.
>Because it shows that "prestige" factor you keep bringing up is worthless without the struggle. It's the struggle that makes a boss worthwhile.
Fine, I'll concede this, but Greevil was still a cool as hell final boss and was definitely memorable to me. Especially if you try to snag all his Shadow Pokemon in one go. I managed that once. XD was also overall a better game than Colosseum.
>Probably not, but I liked that games had secrets to discover.
I did too, and I hate that they've basically been replaced with DLC. But I still think Lugia in XD was implemented and built up better than Ho-oh in Colosseum.
>So towns don't have trainers for you to battle, except when they do but they don't count
Not rebattlable ones like the ones in Colosseum/XD. Whose teams also evolve as you progress through the games. In the mainline games, the rebattlable trainers are on the routes and you often need to use an item (the DexNAV in RSE, the VS Seeker in FRLG and DPP). XD/Colosseum do not require any items, you just leave and reenter the area. And if they aren't enough for you, there's Mt. Battle, which is one of my favorite facilities in Pokemon. Mt. Battle even has dedicated EV Training hotspots where the trainers all use Pokemon that give a certain EV.
>the exploration factor is gone from Colosseum and Gale of Darkness
I'm not sure where you're getting this. I had a fun time poking around the areas and opening chests, especially in the Cipher bases. It being in 3D made it better to me as well.
>my stance this whole time is that Colosseum and Gale of Darkness are companion pieces to gen III rather than standalone games.
And my stance has been that while they can be enhanced by connectivity with the GBA games, they're good enough to stand on their own as well. Unlike Stadium and PBR, which literally needed connectivity with the main games to get any real play value out of them.
>There's another aspect you can argue was somewhat ambitious: The fact that they even had a persistent endgame in mind
I think most endgames in modern Pokemon games are about setting you up for the metagame. I'd noticed this starting with X and Y, that they increasingly went out of their way to pander to metagame players, even at the expense of other things like the campaign. And while some good things came out of this (Super Training, ORAS DexNAV's search function, nature/IV fixing like what you mentioned) I think it's come at the expense of the single-player experience. EXP Share, for example, affecting all Pokemon and not being able to be turned off I think was just as much to pander to metagamers who wanted to quickly train multiple Pokemon at once as it was casuals who wanted to breeze through the game without grinding.