Pokemon Diamond

[farla]

I stopped playing months back shortly after I'd gotten to the various areas, spending my occasional moments with the gameboy hatching eggs. I've started up again, and my pokedex has jumped from just over two hundred to nearly three hundred in a few days thanks to looking up a list of what pokemon appear where, then making my way through them.

It's okay, but there's niggling dissatisfaction.

The dual-slot/dongle thing, I thought, was okay - yeah, penalizing people for not having all the games, but you know Pokemon does that from the start. Not having the dongles work until after the main quest is over...less of a good idea. The same for the pokeradar. Getting to new areas and finding new pokemon is fun. Going back to old areas and checking them one by one to see if a new pokemon has shown up isn't. In the first gen, you got new pokemon in new areas. In the second gen, you got new pokemon in new areas. There were the legendary dogs, but you unlocked that halfway through the game, not after you were done, and swarms, which at least happened during the main game and where the game told you about them. In the first half of third-gen, there's a new pokemon appearing after you've finished everything, in the second half there's new pokemon appearing in general after you hit some arbitrary point...

It doesn't help that the existing pokemon pool is so anemic. As people pointed out early on, there's all of one fire type aside from the starter. Two fire types can be gotten at early routes dongles, which could really help if they were actually accessible.

That the trading system has been half broken since the third generation doesn't help, either. Not wanting to shell out money for another gameboy, I used Pokemon Colosseum if I needed to transfer pokemon, which means I can't trade with a new game, my old way of getting a variety of teams to play through the game with. In the fourth gen, you have to finish playing before you can trade anything from the earlier games, and I've yet to figure out a usable way to trade between games without a second DS.

Which is why I'm downloading a copy of Pearl right now with a DS emulator, followed by an action replay rom, to see if that works.

Comments

[negrek.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. I think they do realize that people use console games for purpose of transfer, though; they even advertised Pokémon Box as being "mass transfer," the fastest way to accomplish that, in my LeafGreen instruction manual. The fact that they removed that possibility entirely with Ranch is what I find hardest to grasp, I guess.

My Nintendo Wi-Fi USB adapter works fine; I'm guessing lack of interest is what got it canceled, though, yeah.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Well, they also discontinued Pokemon Box/only had it available in limited locations in the first place.

Alternatively, they just want people to buy extra DSes more than they did with Advance.