What the hell was nintendo thinking?
This game is complete BS!
Story: 1/10
As usual you're some kid who wants to be a pokemon master because his daddy told him so. The story is about as one-dimensional as the anime itself. GSC, now that had a perfect story, your rival was merciless, in this game, your rival is "your playful friend". What a terrible idea.
Gameplay: 3/10
It;s not too different from the previous game, but they had to add sh***y gimmicks to spice things up on this drek. Now pokemon have "special abilities" which akin to Yu-Gi-Oh crap and throw away the good ol strategies that worked well because people had to work around stupid abilities that no one would really care to research. You now have the ability to go into double battles, but this in turn is nothing special, you can only do this if your fighting double mint twins on the corner or that damn news crew. pretty much NOTHING has changed besides those features, oh and the day and night features have been REMOVED and replaced with "time". Now you have to guess what time it is before you can go catch pokemon because you can't tell what time it is OUTSIDE OF YOUR OWN DAMN HOUSE! Smooth nintendo. Whats even worse is that the new pokemon all look and feel uninteresting, and they are flat out boring compared to the awesome collections in GSC. Speaking of which, the 3rd generation rodents are about the ONLY POKEMON YOU CAN CATCH! While the last 2 generations are none existant. At least GSC made you crave the new pokemon as they were rarer to get. In this game, the new pokemon are treated like common crap, especially since they suck compared to GSC's awesome creatures. Pokemon now have "personalities" which affect how they perform in battle (another pointless gimmick that no one would bother to research for more strategies). I dont know why gamefreak tried to make the game overly complex with these pathetic gimmicks that hardly do ANYTHING to change the course of the battle. It's like they made changes "for fun" because its difficult to innovate a series that can NEVER get better than GSC.
Aside from the cheap gym battles, you now have pokemon contests that are nothing more than show off contests in which you just randomly select moves praying to god that the CPU doesn't pwn the competition with their more awesome moves. These contests are pointless and a waste of time as they do nothing for you in the main game. You also have a "berry mixing game" which is just as boring as the crappy mini-games in game & watch gallery 4.
If that aint enough, the game now contains 13 FRIGGIN LEGENDARIES! Yes, im not kidding. This makes the super secret pokemon seem like nothing more than forced collection upings as these pkmn seem like nothing more than an attempt to beat the already crushed digimon into the ground (a la dan style). Not only that but if you thought the 3 Cat legendaries were a pain in the ass to catch, wait until you spend fifteen million hours doing mindless tasks until you actually get a chance to actually FIGHT the damn things. Not only that but the super secret mirrage island has nothing but baby wobbofets so basically all the fustration of trying to get on the damn island (because of your inability to tell time) is all in vein. Add to that there is no real replay value, (you can't even fight your rival again. Not that'd you want to anyway since you went from having a bad ass to a wuss) and you can't even visit Johto OR Kanto again (I guess gamefreak crammed too much BS in it that clogged up the memory to even included the real prizes) So basically all the great gameplay you came to love from GSC is DEMOLISHED in RS. Not to mention that no Team Rocket = horrible attempts at new villains (team aqua.......come on........at least team rocket sounded fierce, team aqua makes these guys sound like fans of the little mermaid, and the terrible fashion sense makes them look like retarded, new age pirates).
With that said, I suggest you stick with GSC. Its MUCH better and has less BS gimmicks.