With Gen 8 around the corner, Rank all the mainline Pokemon games/generations!

[Darwinianevolution]

Gen 5 - Black/White/Black2/White 2
Great pokemon variety, great stories and characters, great gameplay, great region... While it's not very innovative, it perfected the previous elements that made Pokemon great. The only bad thing is that they started taking features from the games from this game forward.

Gen 2 - Gold/Silver/Crystal
The best jump forward the series has ever had. The updated GS game (HG/SS) is still objectively the best game of the series. No real bad things other than its age making the features it lacks obvious.

Gen 3 - Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald
A classic in all senses of the word, it's basically the standard all other generations should measure themselves with. It pushed the gameplay forward the most with so many additions.

Gen 6 -X/Y
Great, solid games with not that many things added to them. Megaevolutions are nice, but the story and characters are weak. At least streamlined the combat and added fairy typing to solve the dragon metagame, and also ended the weather wars. And Pokemon Amie is always nice to tinker around.

Gen 1 - Red/Blue/Yellow
The original titles, they've aged quite poorly, but they are still solid games on their own. You just need a good pair of nostalgia googles and you're good to go. And if you want something better, play the Gen 3 remakes. Ignore Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee, those solve nothing.

Gen 4 - Diamond/Pearl/Platinum
Weak region and new designs, a confusing region and a story that needed the Platinum update to streamline and make sense of. The slowest games of the series up until that point. At least it had a decent level of challenge, it has the best Elite 4 to date.

Gen 7 - Sun/Moon/US/UM
The amount of handholding this games bring to the series has become an incredibly sore point for me, and that combined with the really small region with little to no thing to explore, a ridiculously low level of diffiulty and features that should really be there at this point, makes this games a chore. And the updated re-releases fixed nothing! For all the faults of Gen 4, Platinum fixed a lot of stuff, US and UM did nothing. Regional variants and mega attacks are not going to cut it when so much has been left to the side.