>>58845455DP had the Battle Zone, which is essentially what XY would have had if they did southern Kalos. DP were also massive improvements over nearly everything in "oops we just barely finished making the game" Gen III. I don't know why people look at Gen III so fondly and at DP with such derision. Imagine if DP replaced 10 of its land routes with water routes, only let you catch 200 Pokémon across the entire game (but don't worry, 49 have been moved pre-National Pokédex :)), had almost no post-game, dropped your rival 2/3 through the game, didn't have any backwards compatibility, required numerous accessories to even fully use instead of the built-in wireless of the DS, make physical DLC with e-Cards, split Team Galactic into two groups with only four collective Pokémon lines between them and had their bosses claim there's too much air to breath or there's too much planet core existing and so they're going to remove air/the planet core to make more room for Pokémon and make that the entire crux of their crusade, remove Ditto so you can't even easily breed, and timegate more Pokémon to future games, and you have Ruby and Sapphire.
>Oh but Emerald exists so you can't criticize Hoenn and Ruby and Sapphire>But Diamond and Pearl nearly killed Pokémon and Platinum saved it by adding Darach and aesthetic snow in the corner of Twinleaf TownPeople who talk like this have never even played Ruby and Sapphire. They never lived through that time when they were out and they were locked off from everything else. They never thought about the sheer monetary investment in trying to buy an e-Reader and all the cards (never even completed in English) and a link cable and the GBA-to-GCN adapter and all the stupid diagrams you had to follow. They just replay Emerald on an emulator four times a year and parrot the same opinions their zoomer brains have been programmed to say. I played Ruby, Emerald, Diamond, and Platinum when they were out and I can say quality only went up.
