LogFAQs > #970012093

Pokemon Pearl (NDS)

The consensus on Pokemon generations evolve over time. Growing up, Gen I and Gen II definitively ruled the roost. Afterwards came Gen III, which was well loved, but didn't create the same energy or immediate adoration that Gen I and Gen II carried on release. When Gen IV came out, Pokemon fatigue had started to set in for me, and for a lot of people who grew up with the older Pokemon games.

Throughout the years, Gen III and Gen IV have gotten a redemptive reading. Children who grew up with these games, as I did with Gen I and Gen II (I was a child with Gen III as well but we'll leave that out for now), were now on the Internet, talking about their memories playing these games and having their first video game experience, let alone Pokemon.

Gen III deserves its redemptive reading. Gen IV does not. This generation is held up by the Gen II remakes and Platinum to a lesser extent. These games aren't bad, but for me they're easily the worst mainline Pokemon experience (although I will admit Gen I and Gen II have a nostalgia bias for me).
Let's start with things Pokmon never really does particularly well: story. The story of DPPt is your basic Pokemon story; you're a ten-year-old child on an adventure to become the best, while stopping an evil team along your tracks. The evil team is Team Galactic, and they're easily the worst of the evil teams. They look dumb, and the vast majority of the Grunts have some really bad Pokemon. This makes sense in the grand scheme of their leader, Cyrus's, plans, but it makes a lot of the encounters boring and non-threatening. There is an attempt to make the story slightly more dark, with the capturing and abuse of the Lake Trio, but that is so short and ineffective, it doesn't really stick with you.

But worse than the evil team plot however, is the Road to the Pokemon League. There is one big reason for this: Sinnoh. Sinnoh is the least interesting region to go through in the Pokemon generations. There are many reasons for this: for one, it is visually uninteresting. You have to understand that Gen II had a lot more interesting designs as compared to Gen I; there were more rustic/feudal buildings, the Radio Tower, Burned Tower, Olivine Lighthouse,... all had unique sprites. Obviously the entire game was in colour as well. There were railroad tracks, different grass sprites in the National Park, different kinds of trees,... The jump to Gen III was even more insane; there were beaches, no longer implied but actual visible sand that left behind footprints! There were bustling market port towns and resort port towns, towns near volcanoes, towns in treetops, and Rustboro with its own unique architecture. Sinnoh has essentially none of that. Oreburgh has a coal mine which you barely do anything in, Canalave has a bridge that goes up to let boats through, and then there's the snow routes and the Great Marsh. While these are new dynamics to Pokemon, they're the perfect example of the downside to realism in video games. There are deep patches of snow or mud for you to get stuck in and have to wiggle out of. This accomplishes nothing other than to annoy you and probably get you stuck in another random encounter if you're not using Repels. I could also give a shoutout to Sunyshore, which has a pathway consisting entirely of solar panels, but Sunyshore is a city that has nothing to offer the player, except for the final Gym.

This is what Sinnoh lacks; reasons for exploration. So many of these towns have little going on and don't even have interesting visuals that make you want to check the houses or talk to NPCs. From a navigational perspective, Sinnoh is also woeful. Hoenn has a beautiful traversal loop, but Sinnoh wants you to jump all over the place in the main quest alone. This design is especially egregious once you're hunting roaming Pokemon, as you can very easily find yourself on the wrong side of a mountain or a water route with no easy way to get to where you're going on foot. These problems are also exacerbated by Gen IV's poor Pokemon spread; you'll be seeing a lot of the same Pokemon in every single patch of grass, no matter how far you progress.

Tied in to these traversal problems are also Gen IV's main gameplay flaw: the HMs. I've always liked the concept of HMs; I think they're a great way to gate content and to push the player in the right direction. I think the execution however has always been flawed. HMs should be items you use (and it is optional to teach them to a Pokemon as a move). But Gen IV expects you to keep Rock Smash, Cut, Defog, Surf, Waterfall, Fly, Rock Climb, and Strength on your Pokemon at all times. It is baffling that Game Freak had the idea to get rid of Flash, but then bring in Defog anyway. Traveling through Sinnoh just isn't a fun time.

Gen IV did make battling a lot of fun though. Most Gens have one big gameplay change they're associated with, and Gen IV's might be the biggest of them all: the physical/special split. Moves are now physical or special depending on the move, and not on their typing. This completely changed the usability of a lot of Pokemon and created a pretty big dynamic. But even here there are some flaws; Gen IV is notoriously slow when it comes to depleting health bars (and Surfing). These make battles drag on much longer than they should. Speaking of Pokemon, the Gen IV dex is not immensely impressive; there's much more fun stuff to be found than in Hoenn for instance, but there's also a bunch of weaker designs and a lot of evolutions to previous-gen Pokemon, none of which look particularly good.

I never got too invested in the bigger mini-games on offer here; the Super Contests seemed an even bigger time investment than the Contests in Gen III did, and the game part of the Underground was meant as a multiplayer with your friends, but the benefits seemed small.
Technically, as mentioned before, I found DPPt to be disappointing. There's very little to set it apart from its predecessors, and it doesn't feel like it takes advantage of the DS hardware at all. Contrariwise, the soundtrack might well be the best of all the games. There's tracks for different times of day, and I love the general jazzy undertones that are present in a lot of the tracks. I could say that the battle tracks (aside from the Champion) are a bit underwhelming, but said Champion track makes up for a lot of shortcomings.

So, all in all, Gen IV are not bad games. They're Pokemon games, so they meet a basic standard of fun that is inherent to the series; I felt satisfied when I finished it. It's just that every other Pokemon game I've played has scratched the Pokemon itch much better.
Final team:
Luxray (Cat Viper) Lvl. 62
Infernape (Azula) Lvl. 63
Floatzel (Weasel) Lvl. 63
Chatot (Octavius) Lvl. 60
Dugtrio (The Mole) Lvl. 60
Tauros (Ram) Lvl. 59