#13. Pokemon Diamond/Pearl (NDS)
Pokemon Diamond and Pearl were eagerly anticipated- they were the first Pokemon games for the Nintendo DS, and after the divisive and controversial third generation, Diamond and Pearl promised a return of multiple features that fans had loved with older Pokemon games, but that the third generation had cut out. And when they released, they delivered a nice, refined Pokemon campaign, with a massive, sprawling region, and some of the most extensive lore Pokemon had seen yet.
They also completely underwhelmed.
Diamond and Pearl brought with them two major innovations to the franchise- online play, which was implemented about as well as an early game on the Nintendo DS would be expected to implement it- and the physical/special split for Pokemon moves, which changed the Pokemon competitive battling landscape dramatically.
This was all great, but in nearly every other way, Diamond and Pearl contended themselves with sticking to just the status quo, to the extent that they fell like expansion packs to Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald more than anything else. The story, though upping the stakes (and worsening the writing), played out almost identically to the Generation 3 pair; the cities were even laid out the same way.
The graphics looked pretty much the same, completely failing to utilize the added juice that the DS’s stronger hardware gave them; features, at most, achieved parity with Ruby and Sapphire, and in many cases, regressed, such as with Pokemon Contests, and Secret Bases.
That, plus the games were a legitimate pain to play through. They moved far too slow. Locked to an unimaginably low framerate, the simple act of movement took far longer than it had any right to; Pokemon battles could legitimately stretch out for as long as an hour, or above. Diamond and Pearl provided a very stable, if flawed base, for future DS Pokemon games to work with, but really, that was it. As it stands today, for all that they did right, these two games are almost unplayable.
