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

[charizamdc.livejournal.com]

I don't really get trying to complete a pokedex. Don't you get bored?

[negrek.livejournal.com]

Mmm, agreed on the trade thing. I don't understand why Nintendo is being so restrictive in terms of between-game trading this gen; PBR only copying pokémon, rather than transferring them like Colosseum did, is understandable, I guess, but the fact that Ranch can't port things between different game cards is seriously annoying. My only thought is that perhaps Nintendo wanted to emphasize the Wi-Fi thing and encourage people to use third-party go-betweens to complete pokémon transfers if you weren't willing to shell out for another game and DS, but even that hardly makes sense.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[farla.livejournal.com]

My only thought is that perhaps Nintendo wanted to emphasize the Wi-Fi thing and encourage people to use third-party go-betweens to complete pokémon transfers if you weren't willing to shell out for another game and DS

Fixed it for you.

Pokemon's original model was "make your friends buy a gameboy and game (or buy a second set yourself)". It just gets more infuriating when they cut out functionality on their side games to continue their existing racket, but it's really nothing new. (See also that the DS's wifi sucks, but they have an extra product you can buy to make it work fine) In fact, I have to wonder now if that might be part of why the main wi-fi system is so insanely broken - it means you still have major incentive to make your friends buy a DS and game, since you can't rely on the worldwide community.

[negrek.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, they've always wanted to make you get more games and systems, but in previous generations they at least allowed the console versions to act as your "second game" when it came to trading. I just don't understand why they would go and remove that possibility for this generation in particular, when they already'd had the opportunity to squeeze people for cash but never taken it in the past.

(See also that the DS's wifi sucks, but they have an extra product you can buy to make it work fine.)

The Wi-Fi USB adapter? They actually discontinued those a while ago. If not, the sucker in me would like to hear about this miracle device.

[wonsab.livejournal.com]

Depressingly enough, I've done it.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I've done it twice.

Fucking tauros!

[farla.livejournal.com]

Well...the second stadium only let you move pokemon if you had a full pokedex on the second game (if you listen closely you can hear the designers laughing at you), and given how time consuming and unoptimized Colosseum trading is (especially with the set number of pokemon) it's possible they didn't realize people would use the game to move pokemon between two secondary games. But then again, my primary sticking point is specifically that it's impossible to do a trade in an early game for a team, and I have no idea if that's common enough for Nintendo to care about enough...but then, why make hurdles for it?

And in that case, let me rephrase it as "Nintendo said they had a gadget to fix the wifi not working on a protected router unless you first bathed everything in holy water and offered up your firstborn child, but I never tried it since it's galling to give them money for screwing up and in retrospect said screwing up should have made me more suspicious."

Unless it works fine and it's discontinued because everyone had similar reactions to actually buying it as me. Who knows?

[wonsab.livejournal.com]

With the current 493, or…?

Stantler was my big nuisance. Not helped by the fact that I was too lazy to get it in my own game and had to rely on the GTS, where the standing offers were asking for legendaries and L100s…Eventually got one by putting up a spare Sableye. Breeding projects without certainty definitely help.

I've thusfar gotten completions on 2nd gen and 4th gen. 2nd gen took me all of six months. 4th gen took more than a year. :<

[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]

The first two games. Third gen I was really rushing through, and got burnt out.

[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.