Moving Right Along…
Maybe they had BW2 planned from the start though (for the DS; after all, the system lived/is living longer than probably anyone figured, we know it's dead/dying now though with the 3DS out.)
On top of that, no DS successor had been announced when they originally started work on Gen V (they started work right after DP if IIRC, which was quite some time ago, obviously.) With sequels in mind too, that might be why we have this huge stretch right now with the DS, their efforts to try to keep the two pairs together.
You know, this might end our little argument over the
Ruby/
Sapphire/
Emerald remakes' target platform if it pans out. GameFreak could not have known at the times which they began developing
Pokémon Diamond and
Pearl Versions and
Pokémon Black and
White Versions that the Nintendo DS family of systems would have already used up almost two fifths and slightly more than 99% of its lifespan, respectively, when these games were released. It makes sense that GameFreak didn't
plan to make the sequels to
Black and
White since the beginning of Generation V because of how the generations of the
Pokémon franchise usually coincide roughly with Nintendo's hardware generations but did
not this time around because of the release of the DSi, which GameFreak might have considered as a console separate enough from the first two members of the DS family to develop
Pokémon games indepently of the previous generation Threrefore, GameFreak must not have initially
intended for Generation V to last as long since the idea of creating numbered sequels to
both of its main games only occurred to their game designers early on the project as implied by a staement made by Junichi Masuda and summarized
here by IGN DS/3DS. In this latter case, Generation V's length might be a direct byproduct of the fact that developing two completely new games takes
much longer than making a directors' cut of two
old games.
Remakes (irl release times) have no real place in any gen if you think about it; we're only assuming this because of the last two such releases. With all of the seemingly surprising releases as of late, I wouldn't be surprised if we got RSEmakes to kick off Pokemon on the 3DS.
I honestly hope that you're right, C Payne, because we're all stuck in the middle of one of Nintendo's painful hardware transitions. This shift in platforms happens to be even more painful for me than usual because I'm still hanging on to my Gameboy Advance and original Nintendo DS for dear life. Even though my personal console interests might not concern you, I remain certain that we all fret over further shattering of the
Pokémon franchise. We worry over this because the series's games interconnect more than most, especially when one considers the fact that some people, like myself, believe that they should be played in order. Without an RSE remake and the importing and trading mechanisms supported by the current games, we would all be sunk in an irresolvable quagmire of ill feelings towards Nintendo. Bring on the remakes!