Dang my newphews (7 and 9) got into playing the older Pokemon games it it is quite fun for me. They talk my ear off about so many things. Even with minecraft which is something I loved a lot back when I played it. They haven't done it with Pokemon yet though. My threshold is too high.
My 7 year old is not quite as strong of a reader as I would have thought so he was very excited about it when he was first playing it, but hasn't gotten too far yet. Not sure what age kids are supposed to be able to read decently, but he's been on more scheduled reading time from his parents recently so I guess he'll get up there.
My 9 year old is dumb far into it though. (Leaf Green & Fire Red btw) 7 badges. It took him forever to find surf. I was really reluctant on helping him out. At some point I gave him a clue telling him to focus on the "later cities" and to read what people were telling him to do. For a while he thought that meant to check the earlier cities. Eventually I refocused him to what I actually meant, he figured out about the perosn telling him there was something in the safari zone. Then he had trouble getting through the safari zone. I was super reluctant to help him, but one day I was over and about to leave, and I was just like whatever I'll sit with him and help him remember dead end paths before I get out of here. When he got to the end, he started running around the house in excitement. At least he's still getting that sense of accomplishement, so that's good enough for me.
Also one really funny thing he did to get surf was leveling up Lapras, which is so funny because that's something I tried to do when I was 8-9 years old playing blue version. I remembered surf taking me a long ass time to find, but I had completely forgot that was something I tried until he told me about it lol.
It's really cool that young kids can still really enjoy those games even though they're pretty old/out of their generation. I've seen quite a few comments suggesting it would be a bad idea to start a little kid out with an older one. The only reason they are is because they were the easiest ones I could give them since I already had the games.
It's cool that they'll have this persepctive and be able to appreciate the games on this level. I think their current gaming habits lend themselves to not finding those pokemon games particularly antiquated. Mostly what they play is minecraft & roblox, with some lego games mixed in, and a few other things. And on their tablets they're always playing these random tablet games, or bootleg pokemon games they come across, so I figure having an older pokemon game to play on handheld would be an upgrade in some sense when compared to much of the stuff they are used to.
I was a bit worried of how they'd see regular old pokemon games like FR & LG after having played creations of Pokemon games on roblox. Maybe they'd just prefer the 3Dness of roblox and not care to play pokemon with sprites from a top/down perspective, maybe they would get "spoiled" by all the freedom it gives you in choosing any random Pokemon that you want, including starting you off with legendaries... That was a big concern of mine indeed, but just the last time I saw my nephew, he mentioned the large variety of Pokemon you can chose in the roblox game, and said "you can start off with legendaries, but I don't want that. It's kinda boring" (or something like that, I'm paraphrasing). And I was like dangg this boi is woke.
Oh and the Pokemon anime is fun to relive as they watch it. They basically watched all of X&Y, that was a while ago. I know they've seen a bunch of Kanto episodes too, but I guess their young age perception of time & memory caused them to forget about a lot of things, so lately it's like they've been having this little reseurgence, + perhaps more knowledge on how to go to some of the older series and watch them in a proper order. Last time they were over, they were using on demand and watching the first episode of different seasons, and I told them that the regions/generations don't completely correspond to the seasons. Then they just asked me what season the generations started on (which I had to look up) and they were watching the first few episodes of multiple gens, just to see they startered and what it was like and stuff. (This is mainly coming from my 9 year old, my 7 year old was watching too but he was more just along for the ride... Though my 7 year old understood my whole season to generation explanation way quicker than my 9 year old did which made for some funny moments)
All they had seen were a bunch of Kanto, all of X&Y, and some amount of Sun and Moon. 2-5 was pretty dang nonexistent for them in terms of the show. Those seasons seem much more hidden/hard to find than the other ones? Anyway at some point my 9 year old said he liked the other ones but wanted to focus on getting through Kanto first and then the others. Which is nice, It'll be interesting to see how far he actually gets though with that episode count. Also how the fuck did this post get so long