“Best” Early Gen Pokemon Game Results
This past March I asked across a couple of different subreddits the “Best” OST for early Gen Pokemon Games and FINALLY got around to putting together the results; not that anyone asked for them, but just feel like I owe it to everyone that participated. That said, I want to thank everyone who responded, I definitely loved seeing other people’s favorites and the reasons why!
Anyways, I have a snapshot of the results above.
As seen, Gen 3 (the Hoenn region) was consistently the winner across the subreddits, with Gen 4 (Sinnoh) as second (aside from the rPokeCorner subreddit, where these two were swapped).
Though more people voted for Gen 3 (the Hoenn region), I saw more comments overall praising Sinnoh. From the comments, I would surmise that Gen 4 (Sinnoh) brings a more chill and ambient kind of vibe from its soundtrack, whereas Gen 3 is a bit more up beat/paced. It also seems that those that prefer Gen 4 then preferred Gen 2, as attitudes towards both these Gens seem to be similar in that they have that more relaxed, laidback sound to the various locations, battles, events, etc. tracks.
One comment said it very well in that “Gens 2 and 4 feel cozy, while gens 1 and 3 feel more gung ho”, and I would definitely agree with that sentiment myself as someone who has played these early gen games a ton. Hoenn with its many trumpets help drive this, and if thinking about route music for Kanto, I personally think of that route music with the snare drum.
Ending off, take this all with a grain of salt as obviously there are considerations/limitations to take into account and this is by no means a definitive answer; even the nature of this question is subjective. I won’t list all limitations or things to be considered, but some of the main ones I thought of:
- Was only asked on Reddit, and at that, only to specific Pokemon related subreddits.
- It’s more a reflection of us ‘Hardcore’ fans, and even at that, those on these specific subreddits; not everyone.
- I stayed away from Pokemon Game specific subreddits to hedge against bias.
- Users on a specific subreddit - there may be some bias depending on active users of subreddit.
- Format of the Post/How it was being asked - Did it bias a responder towards Gen 3??
- Because of the nature of the Reddit Poll’s feature and how I ran this, I could’ve had multiple votes from the same respondent.
- Some of the Subreddits number of respondents were extremely low and probably wouldn’t be considered if it were an official study.
Thank you again everyone who answered! I’d love to see what others think of this/the results, and may do more polls like this in the future!