Ok, so I borrowed Pokemon Pearl for about 2 months and I'm now finished the game and honestly Pearl and Diamond are the best Pokemon games yet. The storyline is rich and doesn't give for plot holes as well as being entertaining. The vocabulary in the game was surprisingly at a higher level then I thought which leads me to believe that this game was intended for the audience that would have grown since the 1st generation release in the 90's. The mini-games are very entertaining, the multiplayer mode of the Underground function is the best addition and I highly enjoy mining, disengaging traps and capturing flags from other players bases and decorating my hideout. I wasn't surprised that there were cut-scenes I just didn't know that the graphics were going to be that good and allowed the cut-scenes to play out very well with a story telling feel to it. I would've like an eight axis form of movement other than the old 4 axis with all the many improvement, but it doesn't take away from the game and there are some points where it needed to be a 4 axis form of movement. You can now run in the game which is something that made me happy. I disliked how games of this nature would restrict you to a slow walking speed without any special upgrade or feature that needs to be attained to increase the movement speed. Not only can you either walk or run, the bike has 2 speed settings as well. You can increase the speed of the bike to enable it to climb hills or just move faster in general.

Speaking of climbing there are more HM's that have been added to the list yet again. Originally it was Cut, Fly, Surf, Strength, Flash. In later generations they added Waterfall and Dive. Now there‘s two more additions, Defog and Rock Climb for a combined 10 HM‘s from the original 5 HM's. On that note the number of Pokemon jumped yet again from 386 to 493. I don't know about you guys, but I missed the original 151. Before that used to seem like so much and the rare Pokemon felt rare, but now with all the new rare Pokemon and legendary Pokemon I just feel bombarded with Pokemon now and I feel that the high numbers of Pokemon are taking away from the uniqueness and value of all the Pokemon. Anyways If you're a serious collector then you'll have to do quite a bit of juggling with all the previous games to attaint all if not most of the Pokemon and Rare Pokemon such as previous legendary Pokemon and so forth. I think they should cool off adding more Pokemon to the game with newer releases just for the fact that they added so much and there can be problems. I believed that if they indeed needed to add more to the Pokemon index they shouldn't have added so many for each generation.

The difficulty level is very real, unlike the previous games. Since there are more types of Pokemon and sub/combined types it brings a whole new level of strategy and battle tactics to the game. Items are much more vital than the last games towards the survivablity of your pokemon. I also noticed that the further you get in the game, the more the enemy's/opponent's Pokemon stats increase. For example even though your Pokemon may out level and be the advantageous type, it would still be a struggle to take the opposing Pokemon down. This was most likely added to prevent one-shot victories in battle. Pokemon Pearl and Diamond are hands down the best releases since the 1st generation (original 3 releases --- Blue, Red, & Yellow) in the series. I felt that even though the 2nd and 3rd generation were average games, they did nothing for the story, so I'm happy that the 4th generation was everything and more.