>>56419528BW isn't that bad in terms of replayability. DP and GS (and to a lesser extent, even HGSS and even Crystal) have even less replayability. Hence the memes about typical Sinnoh and typical Johto team. DP are the pits when it comes to team variation, yet people forget that because of Platinum, romhacks, and randomizers. Playing the games in order with Pearl after Diamond really cements this fact. On one hand, they wanted to limit the Dex to 151 as a tribute to the 10th anniversary of Kanto. Yet at the same time, they ignored type variation. There are only two Fire type and three Electric and Ice type lines. Even Kanto had problems with certain types like Ghost and Dragon, but Sinnoh was much worse. The majority of available Pokemon are locked behind postgame gimmicks like Fight Area and Pokeradar to artificially prolong gametime and this detracts from the main campaign. Imagine how much more fun replays could have been if the Pokeradar Pokemon were available in the actual slots? There's really no reason for the Pokemon to be so limited when there were 493 Pokemon available at the time. In Kanto almost every Pokemon is available without being time gated or forced to grind the RNG hoping to get a Pokemon you like but in Sinnoh, they brought back time based events from Gen 2 (e.g. Safari Zone rotation, Drifloon only on Fridays) and RNG grinding (e.g. Feebas tiles) from Gen 3, in addition to new methods of arbitrarily locking Pokemon behind other methods (e.g. having to catch around 20 variants of the worst shitmon Unown to get Hippopotas, talk to 32 people underground to get Spiritomb, Honey Tree nonsense with some encounters like Munchlax and Heracross being ridiculously rare, etc.) This limits the already meagre 151 Dex even more. Basically the game actively discourages you from replaying the main campaign. Availability of Ice types in DP prior to the Elite Four is someone even worse than Hoenn, even though Hoenn is tropical & half of Mt. Coronet is snowy.
