>>50187596They're objectively slow compared to other games. This may not mean much in isolation, but when you consider how Pokemon displays stuff sequentially like critical hits or super effective messages or stat changes, it adds up. Poor distribution even with the much-needed dex expansion. It's nice that you can find shit like Houndour between Veilstone and Pastoria but the majority of your encounters are still going to be the same Starly/Machop/Shinx/Geodude/Kricketot on every route, which is the main issue. The mere act of traversing the region is bogged down by gimmicks (swamp, snow, fog, overuse of HMs.) Routes are moreso memorable for the aforementioned gimmicks than actually interesting setpieces or designs. Route 210 is fucking enormous but I guarantee you that when 99% of people bring it up it's to complain about the fog. Mt. Coronet is interesting conceptually but in practice you just go through a tunnel 5 different times because the interconnectivity within the mountain itself is useless. This is an issue with Sinnoh as a whole, because unlike Hoenn, you get Fly relatively early on so any shortcuts or backtracking opportunities are rendered moot because you can easily just fucking fly to where you want to go, and in a game as slow as the gen 4 ones that option seems far more tempting than any other time.
You will call these "nitpicks" because you don't actually want to hear criticism, but I'll be kind and throw you an actual nitpick. I PERSONALLY don't care for the music, a lot of themes sound really muddy, but I recognize a lot of other people love Gen 4's music.
