not sure how this game took 5 years for me to complete but hey. a lot to love here but also a lot to feel deeply aggrieved by. the hm reliance is so awful. the level curve is bizarre. its too long probably. but there's a lottttt of magic there. some of the pokemon franchise's most memorable towns. sometimes i'd just fly back to the snowy town or the floral town just to hang out for a bit. the poketch and the underground base shit is so weird and cute and fun. there's a fuckton of variety on display and that's a big part of what makes it memorable. but honeslty like. one of my favorite parts about it is that sinnoh routes feel crafted by a level designer. these smallscale little gauntlets with these small, often unique gimmicks weaving in and out to keep things interesting. when i first played a gen 4 game, pearl, it dovetailed into my gateway into messing with action replay type devices, which unlocked a lifelong love of the weird little out of bounds spaces in games, and just generally trying to poke around and do things i wasnt supposed to. this playthrough, since picking it back up specifically, has happened across two different computers and several handhelds for different niche utilities i used to make my way through to the other side, and in a sense that kind of modular quality is something i've similarly loved for a long time but only recently had the means to act on and explore, and that's also given me a lot to love. hopefully if i ever revisit the sinnoh reason its with yet another broadening of what any average layman can do with these games.