After four generations, Pokemon Diamond is still a very enjoyable game.
Have you played another mainstream Pokemon game? You''ll find no surprises here. (Aside from the new Pokemon and towns - you've played this before) You pick your trainer - either a boy or a girl and whilst exploring the local Lake Verity, your hero is ambushed by wild Pokemon. S/he has no choice but to use the Pokemon from a case left by the Professor of the Sinnoh Region. (Either the grass turtle Turtwig, the fiery ape Chimchar or Piplup the penguin) And so your adventure with Pokemon begins. Welcome to a world where magic, animals and adventure is just the start!
So you should know the drill. Travel from town to town with your Pokemon on a quest to become the Pokemon League Champion. You can catch other Pokemon in the wild by weakening them and then throwing a Poke' Ball at them. You can store a large amount of Pokemon in "Boxes" at Pokemon Centres. You can have six Pokemon with you at a time.
There are eight gyms in the many towns and cities of this Pokemon world. Each specialise in a different type of Pokemon. For example Vielstone City's gym specialises in fighting type Pokemon and Oreburg City's gym specialises in rock type Pokemon. The gyms can be very cheap at times. When your foes Pokemon has only a tiny few pixels of a health bar left, they'll use a potion or the Pokemon will eat a berry. This can make the game more difficult and irritating, but the rest of the game is so good that this issue becomes forgivable
On your way from town to town various trainers and the Team Galactic goons will take you on. The battle system uses a turn based style. There are many Pokemon types (eg. Grass, electric ect) which have strengths and weaknesses on other Pokemon types. Pokemon will learn new attacks through levelling up or if you use TM (Technical Machines) on them. There are also HMs (Hidden Machines) to grant your Pokemon attacks, however these are compulsory for travelling through the game. For example, you will need to learn Rock Climb from a HM to scale certain cliffs. Since your Pokemon can only have four moves each, it's a good idea to research what attacks they can learn through sites such as Serebii or Bulbapedia. It can be quite easy to screw up your teams attack combinations if you don't.
When you have completed the main story, it is a lot of fun to go back and train and raise any Pokemon you missed. You will be very satisfied with this game even after completing it.
Pokemon Diamond is an amazing game, but it has one fatal flaw. Often you will need to go out of your way to level up your Pokemon. This has been an issue in ALL past Pokemon games, but in this game the battles take quite a while even on the max text speed settings. You can spend days trying to get your Pokemon up to the level they need to be at because the game plays so slow. Also with most Pokemon games the story is un-interesting for the most part. Though since Pokemon games are generally very good, lacking a decent story is easy to forgive.
So what actually is the difference between Diamond and Pearl - not much I've played both. SOME of the Pokemon you get are different in both versions. For example in Diamond you are able to catch Stunky, but in Pearl it was replaced with Glameow. In some areas you are more likely to have a certain Pokemon appear in a certain area than in the other version. I lean more towards Diamond because that's the version I played first.
Graphically it's nothing spectacular. The game is played in a top down perspective which doesn't really show off the 3D graphics very well. The battles use sprite graphics much like past games. The effects are quite fun to watch though.
Musically, the battle themes are good, and the route music is catchy too. May not be the strongest pokemon soundtrack, but it is definitely a great listen.
So what are you waiting for? Pokemon Diamond is an absolutely amazing game and is hard not recommend. Overall the game's good points do make it's flaws forgiveable. It's extremely addictive and you can easily spend well over 100 hours on this. It's not that different from past Poke' games, but that's because the formula still works and Pokemon manages to stay entertaining to this day.