I thought it was bland and forgettable. Honestly I only played BW/2 a couple years ago (BW was so shit I never bothered to play it on release), and even though it was that recent I literally can only vaguely remember a couple spots, mostly because of how immensely frustrating they were to navigate. Contrast DPP which I haven't touched in 5 or 6 years yet I can remember most of the region.
You have varied terrain in Unova outside of the cities though.
Kanto is 50% forest, 40% mountains, and 10% ocean. There's basically only 3 tilesets.
Johto has practically the same awful ratio with a couple minor additions.
Hoenn is like 60% ocean, and 20% forests, but you get some variety with the volcano, desert, and Sootopolis.
Sinnoh is where you start getting some real variety, but half the game is still either forests or mountains.
Unova is the pinacle of the games so far. You start out with the traditional forest, but then you get to go to a city that's basically an entire area. Then you have a desert, three different types of mountains, a marsh, a couple towers, an airbase, an ocean, miniature Hawaii, a volcano, and five unique bridges. You're basically never in the same type of area for more than 20 minutes at a time.
Kalos keeps a pretty good variety, but Lumiose City gets extremely stale and you go there a ton.
Alola has pretty good variety, but there's a beach every couple feet and a lot of the interesting places have almost nothing to do in them i.e. Mt. Lanakila and the Tapu ruins.
So what it boils down to is that Unova has more variety than the first 3 games combined.
Depends on what you consider a good plot in a Pokémon game. But even if you like the more consequential and ambitious plots, anything that wasn't contrived in the BW/2 plot was just predictable as all hell. You're really telling me you didn't predict the Ghetsis/N "twist" back when N is first introduced? I thought it was obvious and spent most of the game convinced that they couldn't possibly try to do that twist because it was just too obvious.
I'm not saying the plot was perfect, but it at least had one. The plot in the first 3 games was basically an afterthought, Gen 4 and 6 felt like the player character was just making a few cameo appearances, Gen 7 was a lot of buildup to an unsatisfying (in my opinion) ending. Whereas both Gen 5 games put you in the spotlight, keep a good pace, and live up to the hype they generated.
B1/W1 was also the only (I think) game to have the main villain actually be the final boss. Which made the story feel complete, as opposed to the other games that have the main storyline end and then the game drags out through some boring bits.
I already said what about GSC/HGSS makes me think it has the best story.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. It sounds to me like your ideal plot is that there isn't one.
Forgettable characters--I remember the champion looked vaguely like Lysandre and Lance had a baby, but don't remember his name or any details. Aside from him I remember Cheren(?) and Bianca. Like with the region and its terrain, I only remember them because they were absolutely insufferable.
What characters in the other games (sans 7) are memorable though? It's basically just the champions and enemy team leader, plus the occasional rival. Gen 5 one-ups the other games by having the gym leaders actually do stuff, make multiple rivals, have the rivals be more than just a battle, giving the enemy team a goal that wasn't just world domination, and making the morality of the game something that wasn't just black and white (heh) like the others.
Jesus Christ it looked abysmal. The sprites bounced around like some Candy Crush knockoff
I honestly can't remember a single sprite bouncing in Gen 5, could you please give me an example?
the back sprites were each just 6 MASSIVE pixels because they were zoomed in so far
Eh? Most of them look fine to me.
and whenever the sprites tried to do that shitty rotating thing it looked jagged and blurry. I would like the BW/2 graphics if they didn't try to do so many transformations (scaling, rotating, etc.) on the sprites, because whenever they tried to do that it was literally painful to look at.
That's a tad extreme but yeah, could have been better. Still looks better than all the other 2D games.
All of this is subjective, obviously, but I can't fathom someone liking the Gen 5 music.
Basically every track in Gen 5 is awesome in my opinion. Route themes are head and shoulders above the other games' themes, phenomenal wild, trainer, and gym battle themes, best enemy team theme in the series, the majority of the miscellaneous tracks are awesome.
I just went through an entire list of Gen 5 Pokémon so I could be accurate about which I liked and disliked. I find exactly 20 of them even tolerable. There were 156 new Pokémon. I like (being generous--I don't actually like all 20 of them but those are the ones I find passable) less than 13% of the Gen 5 Pokémon. I like (actually like) at least half of the Pokémon from any other generation.
I counted 23 that I didn't like. Not that I disliked, 23 that I didn't actively like. Guess it's just a difference of opinion.