I had a pokémon phase around gen 6/7 including ORAS, and partly to complete dexes I got previous DS games. Got Pearl/Diamond and Black/White and shared one of each with my sister so we can play in parallel and trade.

I had a blast with black, but pearl… Not so much. Itvfelt like a boring crawl. Mostly because of the terrible pokémon distribution. Seriously, there’s a fire-type elite 4 and there’s literally not enough fire-types in the game for him to have a complete team, even counting the fire starter! And one game doesn’t have any access to dark type until 6th gym or so, while the other has one in a very early area.

And the pokémon that are there feel like they’re always the same, in good part because they decided to keep a lot of pokémon exclusively for the post game area.