Topic: Why does it seem like OG Game Boy and Game Boy Color games don't get any real respect compared to retro games on other older Nintendo platforms?

Wario Land 3, Zelda Oracles, Pokémon Crystal, Harvest Moon… Good times.

GBC is the first handheld I ever had. Got Tetris DX, Frogger, a WWF game and Jurassic Park 2 (which I remember really liking tbh) when I got it for Christmas, good times. I also had Pokemon Yellow, but I got to play that earlier via Pokemon Stadium.

Though its weird to look back on it. Like Nintendo staying with Gameboy for so long made it so they went from GBA to DS super quickly if you really think about it. GBC to DS is only one year longer than GCN to Wii.

Well that’s probably because they didn’t originally intend the DS to completely replace the GBA.

The GBA itself stayed a healthy, normal amount of time around, it just overlapped a lot with the DS.

I wonder what the next Game boy after advance was suppose to be

Well that's true. GBA was very much like 3DS when Switch came out (except with more original games tbh). Though I'd argue its more likely GBA was a backup plan in case the DS didn't catch on, and they didn't do anything like when Super Paper Mario went from being GCN only to Wii only.

It is so weird though that they released a brand new handheld 2 months BEFORE the GBA got an original Zelda game.

The difference being that the GBC library felt like it was almost exclusively shovelware.
Like I could walk into Target and it'd feel like I'm seeing Pokemon but then almost everything else on the shelf looks like it's licensed junk. It felt like "good games" were the minority that you had to go to GameStop (and the one competitor they hadn't yet eaten, EB Games) to find.
Much worse than it was during the original GB days when, yeah of course there was shovelware but I could still feel there was a number of good games to choose from.

Developers HAD to have known the GBA was already in development, so it made sense to not waste too many resources on the GBC (the earliest rumor I read of what became the GBA, was in EGM in 1996! A few years ago Nintendo showed a beta GBA console, I recall a SP form even, which they dated to that time period, essentially confirming it. Nintendo didn't even announce the GBC until half a year before its release in 1998.)

I mean, I guess that makes some sense, but its also very weird in hindsight. Like imagine if the New 3DS had more exclusives and they were all 2nd rate movie tie-in games. Literally everyone would be deeply confused.

I always thought this was odd, yeah. Even if sales were down compared to NDS, the 3DS was still an extremely successful and popular device. So people talking like Switch "saved" Nintendo baffled me. Arguably all it saved was their less popular home console line. Nintendo would have gone on making handhelds regardless.

Even moreso when you consider that it has always been the handheld devices that have kept Nintendo afloat. Aside from the Wii, the sales of Nintendo's home consoles have slowly been sinking for generations, whereas their handheld consoles are usually the best-selling devices in their respective generations.

Popularity and relevancy are not the same thing, is my answer. 3DS and Xbox One both outsold the SNES, but if you asked me which system mattered in the long run, basically anyone with any knowledge of gaming would say SNES.

Between the early sales issues, the huge downgrade from DS sales, the comparative lack of hype for handheld gaming and other issues that make it at least feel like 3DS' audience was not as big as its sales (between people constantly buying new versions of it, and much of the audience for 3DS being kids and other people not concerned with either buying a lot of games nor talking about them on the internet), its not the type of thing that always feels like a big deal.

3rd parties also didn't help. Even with the issues 3rd party games have had on Nintendo, its weird how multiple times Nintendo had the most successful system on the market and most major developers had no interest in it. It's probably not as bad as I imagine it, but from my memory, after 2012 we got like a few spinoffs of console games, a few notable RPGs, that one kinda impressive Gears knock-off, and not much else. Even indie support was probably on par with Wii U at best. Releasing the first 6 Megaman games, on a system that already had them on VC, was a highlight of 3DS 3rd party releases.

To be fair I don't really like the NES or SNES titles either (although SNES titles are acceptable, they're just really basic and tend not to stand out well). NES, GB, and GBC are ALL too simplistic and outdated.