I just do not understand the appeal of Pokemon
I remember you're older than me, what age did you play it at? As I grew up I stopped buying/wanting Pokemon after Fire red/Leaf green. My memory is vague compared to people somehow recalling the entire games. Compared to other gameboy/GBA games, they had a long lasting value for car trips and stuff. If I wasn't a kid playing the games, with other kids and cousins to rejoice with or strive against, I couldn't see the games being as impressionable on me especially for how much time they consume. I never got into Final Fantasy and as good as the story supposedly is I can't handle anymore turn based gameplay.
Oh, I also remember late in my Pokemon career I just got done capturing a Shiny Raltz or something Pokemon and set the game down and went to the bathroom: and my younger cousin turned the game off to be a punk. I think that might have made me give it up a bit, kind of like how I got my account password in Runescape tricked to be entered into a fake log-in site (for this guy asking me to bump his thread for him) and he dropped all my stuff the one day I didn't feel like putting the valuables back in the bank even though I was right next to one.
After stuff like that, I kinda devoted myself to playing games where the value you build in the game is solely skill: where games like Wc3 and Dota 1 you start out the same each time with the same stuff as a noob and it's what you do with it, and FPS games and Smash (which I've done casually since 64 and got into competitive later on).
Oh and Silver was probably my favorite Pokemon game besides Stadium. The ability for it to tell time and turn into night was cool along with everything else, and I remember specifically when I got the game for my birthday.