Pokemon Pearl (2006). Junichi Masuda, Game Freak.

I think this is the definitive Pokemon game (or at least it has the potential to be). From the very first moments I had with this game, looking at how the day/night cycle came back in all of its glory and its vibrant spaces brought to life with that kind of rudimentary 3D from the DS I knew I was going to love it. After looking at how it already incorporated my favorite characteristics from previous games there was very little left to ask for this game, and even with my favour practically won, it delivers a really decent product.

As I said in the beginning, it feels like the culmination of all the succesful ideas of previous games. It has the immersive and alive world of the Gen 2, besides bringing a couple Pokemon guests from the same gen and giving them evolutions, in general it kind of feels like a more direct succesor of everything explored in Gen 2, but with the visual and techinc advantages from Gen 3, making it a delight to cross its world in all aspects.

It feels like the best presentation of what the Pokemon games were up to that point, with its good ammount of new additions (the underworld with functional Wi-Fi must have been crazy, and the differentiation between physical and special attacks is one of the most necessary and genius things there's been in the battle system), and in general it might be the most balanced and solid Pokemon game I've seen yet. All the pokemon it adds are really good, the story doesn't ask for much to follow it but it's really interesting still, all the secondary mechanics it includes feel complete and fun. Before playing it, I heard they called it long as something bad, and even though it is a bit long, I never saw it as something bad, all the opposite, I think the game's extension and how long you spend in each area makes it so that you end up appreciating more the region and feel part of it, I've also listened a lot about how the 5th Genetarion changed Pokemon games completely, in that this game, being its predecessor is the entire opposite: it's the Pokemon formula in its most essential and well done, and it manages to still have its own identity.

Now, as much as I would love it to be that way, not everything on the genetration is perfect. On one hand, there's how ridiculously necessary the HMs are to progress in the story at the point in wich you practically need all of them to finish the game, which wouldn't really be a problem if they didn't still need to occupy one of your incredibly reduced 4 spaces for moves, but not even that would be that bad if some of them weren't so goddamn useless in battle (*cof* Rock Smash *cof*).

Although probably the worst part of the game was the tragic lack of new pokemon. Starting with the fact that most of the "new" pokemon it introduces are evolutions, wich from the get.go is a problem, but not only that, thy're complicated evolutions that require from difficult processes and stones, and that wouldn't have anything wrong if there only ever was anyclue of how to use the lot of evolution stones they just throw at your face in the game. I mean, I can understand that they give such a protagonism to stones because it's kind of the theme of the generation and there's all the fun in the underground, but because of exactly that they had a lot of opportunities of including this mechanic in a simple and understandable form. I would literally have never known half of the evolutions if I hadn't looked in external methods. And it's worse taking into account how incredible are the new pokemon they do include: Lucario, the 3 starters, Drifloon and Drifblim, even evolutions like Roserade are fantastic, but all the potential they present just makes it so it hurts more to see how limited it is.

THat still doesn't take away from everything that's great in the game, the legacy pokemon they decided to include are great as well, (specially the Gen 2 ones 'cause I'm a simp), and I've heard that the problem with variety gets fixed in Platinum, I guess I will discover that the day I decide to travel through the third versions. Even with all of that, the 4th generation of main line Pokemon games will go down as one of the more balanced and solid generations in the series, that gave me and incredible time exploring it and it was another more than decent step in my way through the franchise.