4th Gen Disappointments

When it comes to disappointments I have with 4th gen, they are as follows:
in Diamond and Pearl: Lack of Fire Type Pokemon
in Platinum: I can't think of any
in Heart Gold and Soul Silver: Replacing the slot machines in the Game Corner with the Voltorb Flip crap and getting rid of the ability to buy coins.

Diamond and Pearl are great games and I used to love playing them! :) But now looking back, there are a lot of issues with the format of the games, such as:

1. There technically wasn't a whole ton of new pokemon introduced in gen 4. A good chunk of the gen 4 pokemon were either baby pokemon or new evolutions for previous pokemon. (Tanglegrowth, seriously?)

2. One word, "Poketch". It's basically a glorified Tiger Electronics watch. Remember all of those useless apps that people gave to you? There's a reason why they gave them to you for free! XD The only app I found useful was the day care app and the step counting app.

3. Probably the most talked about issue is the lack of speed.

Other than that, I am thankful that this generation gave us Lucario!!! :D

The bad framerate is what I always rant about the whole 4th Gen, otherwise Dpt/HgSs aren't that bad.

The only things I don't like are as follows:

1) The games are too slow.
2) DP needed another Fire-type not called Rapidash. The flaming stallion itself isn't terrible actually, as Ponyta is very powerful early on and learns good moves, but another option was needed. I think only one more would be enough, provided it was neither Magcargo nor Torkoal.
3) Many of the new evolutions are too convoluted. I'd love to use them without cheating.

Even with Pokemon from Gen IV that I absolutely love such as Rotom & Magnezone, the games really did lack a few Pokemon for certain roles. Continuing from Cerberus' post, the fact that unless you started with Chimchar, you had to make do with Ponyta/Rapidash made me quite annoyed. That and the speed. I only played through Diamond because I was young and didn't notice the lack of speed, and also because I was pretty hyped (birthday presents, y'know).

Thank goodness Platinum cleared up pretty much every problem D/P had.

Disappointments with D/P/Pt:

The slowness and fire-type issues obviously, but that's beating a dead horse. I would also cite bland and unmemorable character designs for most of the Gym Leaders and side characters. Cynthia, Team Plasma, the Elite 4, Riley, and the player/rivals pretty much sucked up all the artwork. But my biggest complaint was that obvious low level side areas were put in locations that made it unlikely the player would visit them until an (unlikely) random visit in the general area (looking at you Fuego Forge!). Basically, my issue with DPPt is that they were too ambitious and then fumbled the ball.

Disappointments with HGSS:
The Leveling curve. But this is more one I'm willing to let slide because HGSS after Ecruteak City is actually fairly open world for a Pokemon Game. You can go east to Mahogany and face Team Rocket or go west to Olivine and help Jasmine. And unlike RBY/FRLG where you had to do the Team Rocket plot to unlock some open worldness, it was more liberating. My solution, however, would have been to make Route 45, 27 and 26 + Victory Road much higher level in exchange. But that's me.

The only other disappointment I have with HGSS, is one of hindsight. With the 3D leap in Gen VI I WISH HGSS had been held back for this! HNNG. Hoenn looks so beautiful in 3D and I wish Johto had the same chance.

I liked platinum dont get me wrong its just that diamonds storyline didnt keep you wondering it felt like soooooo long till you get to the next gym and even then i didnt feel in a rush to beat it thats the only thing i didnt like though besides Barry i cant say i loved him as a rival xD

HGSS

First, I was really hoping that they'd do more of a revamp to the Pokedex, like ORAS did. I just can't understand the decision not to add all cross-generational evolutions; in a game without trade restrictions, what's the point of not adding, for example, Mismagius?

I like Voltorb Flip and, if it were a standalone mobile game I would probably play it, but as part of this game, I don't like it. Especially since, for whatever reason, they removed the ability to buy coins, forcing you to play it if you want anything from the Game Corner.

The walking Pokemon feature, cool as it was, felt extremely pointless. At the very least, I'd expect unique dialogue for Elm and Oak when you show up with a legendary Pokemon in tow. I was also hoping that they would fix Johto's level curve, but that didn't really get touched.

Extremely minor, but I really liked Route 46 in Crystal, and I was hoping that it'd give early access to Phanpy or Teddiursa (depending on version), as it did in Crystal, but that didn't happen either.

Think most of mine have been said; hardly any Fire-types in D/P (I never played Platinum). Ponyta gets very tedious after a while. I just trade stuff over from HG.
Also I was gobsmacked how SLOW this game was when I first played it in 2007; I genuinely thought something was wrong with my DS system or the cartridge. Aside from that, not too many complaints; mainly the lack of Pokémon variety and also how the Elite Four music was a gargantuan let-down. Cynthia's made up for it though ;)
Some of the Gym Leaders' Pokémon teams were a bit bland too. Volkner... really? An Octillery?

The lack of difficulty and challenge. The only way to get really tough and intensive battles was playing online, the story mode wasn't very challenging. The only battle were I struggled with was Claire in SoulSilver, because of the fact that I had nothing that was useful against Dragon types.

I had some mixed feeling about diamond, I loved a lot of the new additions like the underground. But when it came to the actual gameplay and story it just felt slow.
It didn't help either the fact that the game's save times were nearly a minute long on the ds lite

Generation IV is my favourite of all the generations, so it's hard to think of anything negative that I could say about them. I suppose the speed could be better, some of the battles tend to drag out from time to time.

Disappointments? That they didn't make more games in this Gen.

LMB10 said:

Disappointments? That they didn't make more games in this Gen.

Click to expand...

The thing is, the series has to move forward which is something you have to get used to. The generation usually changes after 3 years, so it's expected. But yeah I can understand you are sad we had to leave this generation behind.

Hikamaru said:

The thing is, the series has to move forward which is something you have to get used to. The generation usually changes after 3 years, so it's expected. But yeah I can understand you are sad we had to leave this generation behind.

Click to expand...

Oh no absolutely, of course it does. Just remember being kinda bummed when they announced Black and White, which I ended up not really liking.

problems with dppt:
- that one massive chunk of storyline between gym battles
- mt. coronet was huge and tedious to climb
- only a battle tower after elite 4 (rectified in pt)
- lack of previous gen legendaries (although the birds were added in pt)

problems with hgss:
- incredibly frustrating and tedious to level up
- the lack of of gen III pokemon
- the safari zone was confusing to understand at first, and you have to play it A LOT to get all the pokemon
- you had to traverse almost all of johto to get fly
- having to catch ho-oh/lugia to continue with the story (i don't like it when you have to catch legendaries to progress)
- the pokewalker is ridiculous, you have to walk 2,000,000 steps to unlock everything (and then you have to go to nintendo events to get more)
- the box system is not user friendly and very slow (glad they changed it back in bw)
- lack of evolution stones (had to play the pokethalon many times to get my arcanine)
- the pokedex was slow to use
- voltorb flip, enough said
- the surfing music was remade badly
- had to beat 16 gyms and red to get gen I and III starters >:(
- only certain trees give pokemon when headbutt'd
- no feasible way of growing berries
- having to trade a groudon from ss to hg or a kyogre from hg to ss to get rayquaza

problems with gen IV on whole
- way too many pokemon that relate to other pokemon (although i'm starting to like them more)
- downgraded to 30fps rather than the 60 in gen III
- many event legendaries

this is more of a hgss disappointment rant than dppt, for how expensive it is to buy second hand in uk (£28, 2.3x dp's price, 1.5x pt's) i thought it would be a the best game from gen IV but i just ended up not liking it despite it having some really cool features now my rant is over i can go back to living my life

HGSS

-Not being able to turn the follow feature on and off at will.
-Not being able to purchase coins with money.
-Pokemon like Celebi and Mew only being obtainable through events. I guess you could say I should have expected that much but it's still disappointing to me when they continue this tradition.

D/P/Pt

- No follow feature for Platinum at all.
- Almost of all the legendary Pokemon have bland or ugly designs.
- The entire story/journey felt a bit redundant. I know every game follows the same basic formula but that's all the more reason they need to spice up the plot and features with every new generation. The novelty of new Pokemon and better graphics only lasts so long.

Surprisingly, I've never actually played Diamond and Pearl. I waited for Platinum to actually play any of the games, and that's the one I am used to.
There were a couple of frustrating things, including the abundance of caves. Many of the routes were also extremely long stretches, which was irritating at times. I have no qualms with HeartGold and SoulSilver.
A lot of people are complaining about the lack of fire types in Diamond and Pearl, complaining about Rapidash, but you guys have to remember: you don't have to use a fire type. It's that simple. It's not like water or flying, where you are essentially forced into using them for HM purposes.

I think it's retarded that in HG/SS you had to wait until pretty much the end of the game to get the retro tunes back...

HGSS let me down a little bit, the overall graphics and aesthetics of the game were sooo bad imo. They just didn't feel like GSC. FRLG and ORAS both managed to be very forward in the graphics department while still maintaining the level of nostalgia that people are looking for in remakes, but HGSS just didn't do that for me. It felt more of a stand alone game than a GSC remake, in all honesty.