I hated Pokemon when it was cool to own five million pounds of various Pokemon related merch. I always thought it was dumb, Japanesey, and over-hyped. Things that over merchandise always piss me off. But that is not the point of this article. I'm just giving my prior stance.

I picked up Diamond a few weeks ago because I needed something to play. Jeff has a copy of Pearl so I figured I could also play him when I move out to Florida. I will say that m experience was better than I expected it would be, but if you are a die hard RPG fan it will not satisfy your apetite.

Though it is classified as such, Pearl/Diamond is not much of an RPG. It shares many aspects that are common to the genre such as battles, leveling up, world exploration and such, but it lacks the one thing that makes Final Fantasy games the best RPGs ever: story. The game opens with you and your buddy suddenly waking up and deciding to become Pokemon trainers. A certai Dr. Rowan gives you your Pokedex and you are given your primary mission of filling it with all sorts of info on exoctic Pokemans. As you traverse the globe of Sinnoh you stop by local gyms to obtain badges which allow you to progress through the game.

Being a grinding game you'll be seeing a lot of the battle screen. Entering battle combines the two most common elements of RPGs: random encounters and visible ones (a la Mario RPG). The random encounters only happen in caves, water, and the "tall grass". Dotted along the rest of the map are various peoples who, without asking your permission before hand, decide to do battle when you enter their line of sight. These are all rather easy and trite and more of a nuasance than anything.

Almost all battles are one on one making leveling up more than one or two of your Pokemon difficult and lengthy at best. One thing that really pissed me off were the stupid messages. Every time anything happens there's a message announcing it. "It's still raining", "Biscuit used Metal Claw", "Fire Anus's health was drained", "It's not effective". This drags out an already slow paced game. One thing that I found amusing/annoying in particular were the "effectiveness" messages. It's tell you your attack wasn't effective and then your enemy would proceed to die.

One thing this game is definitely not selling itself on are visuals or audio. The map is a combination of 3D environment with 2D sprites. The battle effects are probably the best looking parts of this game but still don't compare the Final Fantasy VI (keep in mind that game is 13 years old and was made for the Super Nintendo). Music is meh. Hummable but not memorable. The sound effects suck ass. You can always tell when a Pokemon was from the original game because it's little battle cry would be a series of Gameboyesque beeps. It's really sad when the dev team is too lazy to rerecord the sounds for better hardware. It sounds really stupid and out of place.

So I've been pretty harsh up to now. I wasn't throughly impressed but I was mildly entertained. I don't know if I'll continue to play now that I've finished that game (there are more quests and, of course, grinding). About the only replay value this game offers is through net play. But you'll have to know some people with the game and do the appropriate friend code swapping. Overall I give the game a 5/10.