Late but that's exactly why I hate it. It throws the minecart theme of its pre-evolutions in the garbage to become yet another generic monster:
You can really tell that GF is a japanese company, because pretty much all of their designs based on yokai and whatnot turn out great. Makes me wish we'd get another japan inspired region like gens 1-4.
idk I really like their American mons in gen 5
Unova in general was insanely good and I'm tired of people shitting on the ice cream cone and trash bag. I think it was also the first gen that had western pokemon designers, too—though James Turner had worked on other aspects of design for Coliseum before that iirc.
My only real problem with Unova, is that most of the new Pokemon are almost literal reskins of Kanto Pokemon, down to having 3 Stage Fighting and Psychic evo's who require Trade Evos. Which made the exclusion of all the old Pokemon until the Post-Game kinda funny,
Makes me appreciate Gigalith for being kinda subversive. Nothing's special; it's just a one-eyed rock in Roggenrola to more rocks in Boldore to just a tough-looking rock monster in Gigalith.
Unova is, for some reason, often put artificially at some super ultra high standards that other gens simply aren't. It's probably a subconscious thing, as some people are probably too prideful to admit the they were wrong about their initial reactions to gen 5. Of course you can criticize gen 5 all you want, it's just that a lot of the criticisms like pokemon design are super subjective.
Unova has always gotten a lot of Haye from a lot of different groups. It was considered the "end" of old-school pokemon for a while which meant oldfags hated it, it had an entirely new dex which made genwunners hate it, it was the first region based on a foreign country which made the weebs hate it, it recycled a lot of tropes from early gens which didn't have the benefit of nostalgia re: object mons etc, and it was also the first mainline game to have a story-story.
This Just looks like a sonic mascot.
Something really weird about gen 5 is that it was pretty poorly received at the time, people weren't really high on it until B2W2, and especially X&Y
IMO Rolycoly is the only one from that evo line that actually looks good.
I think part of that comes down to Unova - Gen 5 as a whole really - being the last time we could tell that Game Freak truly gave a shit. X and Y feeling incredibly unfinished likely didn't help.
My main criticism with the Gen 5 mons is that they pretty much has the same stat spread and movepools as their kanto counterparts, for example gigalith basically has the same stat spread as golem for example. I would've liked more variety in stat spread, like how swoobat was a fast special attacker instead of a physical one. Gigalith could be a special attacking rock type with power gem and element moves like thunderbolt for example. However, there are many more pokemon that are pretty much different from any other of their counterparts, like eelectross for example being a bulky mixed attacker. It largely isn't a huge deal for me but the veriety would've been nice.
I definitely agree that a part of it is nostalgia, but a lot of the older games still hold up mechanically.
Remakes never ge 'third versions', but rather ge their material integrated into the remakes... normally.
I never thought the level curve was an issue in Gen 5. In fact, I'd say they're two of the nicest level curves since the scaled EXP keeps you from getting too overleveled, which a way bigger problem in Pokemon games than being underleveled, and if you do want to grind some new underleveled catch then the scaled EXP plus Audino makes it fairly quick.
If by "normally" you mean one time, in HGSS. FRLG didn't really have anything from Yellow, though people didn't really think much of it since Yellow was more of a side-grade than direct upgrade like later third versions. ORAS didn't really have anything from Emerald, and then BDSP didn't really have anything from Platinum. It was only HGSS that integrated most of the stuff from Crystal (there's couple neat wild Pokemon locations in Crystal they didn't think to put in HGSS, but that's about it).
Half-True