Back on Gen 6 I organically filled a full dex (650 mons at the time) through a combination of Pearl, Black, X and Alpha Sapphire, with occasional exchanges with my sister who had the counterpart games. Also a few spin-off exports like Pokémon Ranger and Ranch.
At that time there was a distribution for the mythical pokémon too, so with all that I had everything.
After that I played through Gen 7 (Moon and Ultra Sun), and then completely lost interest when I learned the next gen wouldn’t even let you use mons that are not in its regional dex (and then the reports of terrible performance. 3DS was already barely tolerable).
Of all I played, I’d say the most fun were Gen 5 (Black) and Alpha Sapphire. Pearl felt like a chore.
MyNameIsAtticus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m planning to do something similar where I just trade them up game by game. So I take my Gen 3 Living Dex over to Gen 4, then add Gen 4 into that metaphorical “pool”. Then go to Gen 5, once I get to Gen 6 though I think I’m done with a living Dex because that’s kind of all I need to fill out Pokemon Home. Anything niche I’m missing I’m sure I can catch.
I’m with you on Pearl (or, well, in my case platinum). I love gen 4 but I can only play it once, with a second play through being hard to stomach.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 23 hours ago
I have never played platinum, but from what I gathered it is significantly improved compared to Pearl/Diamond. Those are really painful to play.
They’re really clunky and repetitve, but the worst part is mon distribution. There are barely any fire types in the games, to the point the Fire-Type elite 4 has only 2 in his 5 mon team. And one of them is the evolved fire starter. There is literally no other fire type obtainable at that point.
They decided to keep most of the diversity in the post game (lots of old species that get a new evolution mostly) so until you get there it feels like you’re meeting the same twenty different pokémon over and over again.
Bonus : Diamond has one dark-type easily accessible before psychic gym (which is already well into the game). Pearl doesn’t. Its only dark-type comes in very late game. It’s like nobody checked these games’ balance.
MyNameIsAtticus@lemmy.world 7 minutes ago
Now that you point out the balance i can really see it. It never really occurred to me, especially the lack of fire types