ポケットモンスター ダイヤモンド

You can complain about a lot of things in later games, but these games are the only ones to make the core gameplay loop not fun, and they're my least favorites for it.

It would definitely be appropriate to call this game a test run for Platinum

the game is, like.. fine.. but it's obsolete. that's how i have to rate all of these pokemon games that had a later "third version" come out. as obsolete.
This is different to remakes. OR/AS is not better than Emerald, for example, but Emerald is leagues better than R/S. The same goes for D/P. Sorry. I just can't play this version anymore. Why would I? But also, why didn't they just cook the games for an extra year in the first place? I mean.. Money.

Battle frontier slaps.

Why trainers have always the same 3/4 pokemon this is very annoying

The DS was my first system and I mostly played movie tie-ins and lego games. Then my best friend at the time gave me his copy of Diamond. I can still vividly remember sitting on his couch and having my first ever battle with a wild bidoof lol. Easily the most formative game for me personally.

Just finished a recent playthrough and the more time passes, the more I realize that Diamond/Pearl were really the first bad game in the series. The framework is there, Sinnoh is a wonderful region, the new Pokémon designs are fine, Team Galactic is pretty cool, but: The Pokémon distribution is even worse than in Gen 2, fights are rarely challenging (except for Aaron and Lucian, Cynthia also a bit but Giga Impact on Garchomp?), the story climax feels a bit rushed, the gym route is very weird and confusing and why is half of the Pokédex locked before the E4? Luckily Platinum improves on all of these aspects and became the wonderful game Sinnoh as a region deserves to have!

loved this as a kid but it also sucks just play platinum on an emulator lol