Gen 5 was a soft reboot of the franchise, and you had all these crybabies coming out... And yes, I'll call them crybabies... Bitching and moaning about how they couldn't play with their favorites. They didn't even appreciate the changes that the games brought to the table which actually made the games a lot better, and would've probably put pokemon on a much more acceptable evolution for gaming.
Improved battling, improved music, improved abilities, a much well rounded roster, making the use of TMs a lot easier, the improved polish on the moving sprites.
The only reason, and I mean, the ONLY reason why people are liking gen 5 now and pointing to when it was the peak of pokemon, is because they are finally realizing how dumb they were for bitching about how they couldn't play with their favorite pokemon in the games.
When that was a lie. And was even fixed in the sequels that had a lot more content in them.
But no, the backlash from Gen 5 told Gamefreak that they shouldn't experiment with Pokemon. They shouldn't try anything new or drastic.
And now we've got this whole mess.
Thanks pokemon fan base, you and your paper thin skin.
Oh boy, Gen 5... Where to begin...
They fucked themselves over by double-dipping on the DS. It was never going to sell well, at least not compared to the Jhoto remakes that blew everything else out of the water in terms of sheer density of pandering/content. So they tried to be experimental, at least so people wouldn't ding them for just releasing the exact same thing on the exact same system. But they effed it up in areas that mattered, and then they effed up a bit more by doing remake versions.
The game's 3D modeling, not fit for the DS, made vast swathes of the world look a bit too dark and depressed, so they decided to drop the 2-D spritework people liked and swing the next games in the opposite direction of color. There was no Battle Frontier, just a crappy Battle Tower replacement halfway through the first game and fan-bait in the second game, and because not enough people whined about
that, they decided that they didn't need a Battle Frontier ever again. There was effectively no functional New Game option with B2/W2 due to a saving oversight, rendering the new difficulty settings pointless because there was nowhere to stash your new Pokemon at the time other than another game copy, and they decided to scrap both the New Game setting and the difficulty settings as a result. Their new combat-affecting thingies (Triple Battles, Rotation Battles, Hidden Abilities) weren't used nearly enough to justify their existence in the series, unlike Hoenn's Double Battles, so those things were swept away with the tide.
Only legendaries had appealing movesets, while the rest were neutered to force use of the infinite TMs. And I get that they wanted to fill out the movepools with "technical" stuff, but it was simply annoying for casual players who just wanted to pound through the game. B2/W2 added Riolu in the beginning area for some stupid reason, giving players a vehicle to completely fuck the late game with without even trying, while in B/W you had to awkwardly mess around with these unfamiliar trash mons and your slightly-wonky starter instead (unless you bought B/W from certain reputable establishments, in which case they just gave you an over-leveled Lucario right away). They also straight-up gave you a Zorua in B2/W2 as some sort of apology for how contrived it was to try and get one in B/W, since a lot of kids didn't get HG/SS at the right time or didn't know how the heck the Mystery Gift system worked.
As for Unova itself, well, it's a circle. It's a relatively-well-decorated circle, and it has a few branches sticking out from it, but it's not going to win any hearts and minds outside of the people who really did hate HMs that much. The only cool things about it were the Entralink & Black City/White Forest, but they gave up on the version-exclusive-cities with B2/W2 in favor of
another boring postgame grind, and they cared so little about the Entralink that all they did with it in B2/W2 was drain the moat around it.
And the menus and interface buttons looked bad.
The Dream World was fun, though, I'd take a freemium mobile version of that over Go pandering any day.