As a kid it was always hard to decide on whether I enjoyed Diamond or Crystal the best out of the Pokemon games I owned and played. I was lucky as a kid, being given a GameBoy color at a young age by a generous cousin, alongside several Pokemon games that I played to death on the system. Despite my age (24 at the time of writing this), Most of my Pokemon experience was spread across gen 1, 2, and 4, with interest in Pokemon dying down around the release of B/W because I was getting "too cool" for it, and me never owning - but still borrowed - Gen 3 games from friends.

I bring up all that preamble because both gen 2 and 4 were my primary Pokemon generations as a kid, so coming back to the mainline series after all this time was quite the thrill ride. If you take a look at my log dates, though, you can see that not only was my logging for this sloppy, but this game took me way too long to finish; why is that?

I'm not sure I will ever know that answer, but I do know that despite this being a "match made in heaven" of sorts, I had several burnout periods with this game for seemingly no reason. Hell, I played through my very first Persona game while I was technically in the middle of this. I think some of that has to do to this rudimentary design that I grew tired of rather fast when playing these games as a kid. Being someone who started at gen 1 - that being unusual for my age - but progressing through all 4 gens and then some grew a bit tiring. This song and dance has been displayed many times, but the linear gym/HM structure is rather regressive in constraining players in annoying ways. Several points of my playthrough were hit with obnoxious walls, filled with tedious quests where you have to talk to a guy who knows a guy to get a thing for a guy...zzzzzz Moments like these kill the pacing of an otherwise great RPG, but I suppose that's part of having to adhere strictly to old material.