Now I'm kind of glad Game Freak took the remakes in this direction. Gen 4 getting the short end of the stick once again. Compared to the gorgeous, fully-updated remakes afforded Gen 3, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl seemed to be on the losing end of things. But when they were finally announced earlier this year, the community was left feeling slightly bemused. Still, that didn't stop the community demanding Diamond and Pearl remakes, if only because they were next in line after 2014's Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. But to say that a game refined the existing formula isn't a terribly exciting legacy, which is perhaps the biggest reason that Gen 4 wound up getting lost in the mix of history.
Most critically, it introduced true online play, paving the way for the community to grow into what it is today. It brought back several features that had been cut in Ruby and Sapphire, redefined the balance of the competitive game by splitting physical and special attacks, and introduced several much-needed evolutions for Pokémon like Roselia and Piloswine. On reflection, the Pokémon Diamond and Pearl generation was mostly about refinement. Most of the love for latter day Pokémon games are generally reserved for the likes of Black and White, with little respect given to Diamond and Pearl's striking atmosphere and the myriad improvements it made to Ruby and Sapphire. Developer Game Freak didn’t even see fit to include Diamond and Pearl’s starters in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, despite the fact that their (mostly) open world Pokémon adventure is set in an ancient version of Gen 4’s Sinnoh Region. In the years since, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl have been given comparatively short shrift, much to my chagrin.
Needless to say it’s held a special place in my heart ever since - the first generation that I played entirely in Japanese, and one that has a way of transporting me back to one of my favorite times in my life. Over the ensuing months I spent hundreds of hours in the Sinnoh region, where I was pulled deep into the nascent online community. In late 2006, I took a Tokyo train a few stations down to pick up a copy of Pokémon Pearl on a whim, which had launched in Japan earlier that day.