Pokemon Heartgold and Soulsilver. As a remake of a couple of the series' most popular entries, recreated with the more advanced technology availible and everything they learned from the past three generations, you would think these would be the best games yet. But they're not.

First and foremost, the Pokegear. The Pokegear was a device from ten years ago. It had neat functionality, and worked nicely, but has been made completely obsolete by the later developments in the series. The Poketch, in particular, from D/P/Pt, was a much more useful and convenient device. More functionality, easier interface (since you didn't have to crawl through menus), and a better asthetic (even if the original Gameboy style graphics did get annoying to some people). Instead, they decide to fill the touchscreen with the menu the entire bloody game. This is, of course, so that you can use the touchscreen to access the menu, but Nintendo has once again forgotten that the touchscreen sucks. For any sane player, the menu will be accessed through buttons exclusively, and the touchscreen will be almost entirely unused (except for the Itemfinder, which works great, except that you can't actually register it to a button hotkey for some moronic reason, nor can you walk around with it always active the way you could in D/P/Pt). Once again, gimmickry drags down a Nintendo game. Then there is the phone function, which is one of the most infuriating functions put in a Nintendo game ever. I don't mind getting calls for rematchs or items (although, again, the series had improved past that with the Vs. Seeker, and Nintendo once again chooses to go backwards), but since the game makes an annoying habit of calling you while you are in the middle of doing something else, like right before you enter a buiding or talk to someone, you wind up losing 95% of the phonecalls with no way to recover them. Fortunately, the important ones will actually freeze the game and make you listen to them, but it does have the effect of making the feature all but useless (especially if you play with sound off, since the visual notification is quite easy to miss).

Then there is the Pokeathlon. I hate this thing with a fiery passion. Granted, the extra contests have always been a bit annoying, but this one just totally ticks me off. D/P/Pt had a decent enough system for that. Poffins were easy to understand, easy to make, and infuriating to perfect. But, Nintendo just decided they didn't like the beauty contest either, and so junked it, the same way they had the previous contests. If they aren't going to stick with a single contest mechanic ever, it makes it nearly impossible to get any real investment in the system. Sticking with the same battle mechanics and just developing them further worked wonders for the series as a whole, but they seem reluctant to expand upon that at all.

And, finally, there is the other thing, which is the inability to evolve a lot of the Pokemon. Hopefully they will never repeat the stupidity of the Sinnoh evolutions in another game, but they really need to make an alternative way to evolve the Pokemon who could only evolve on Mt. Coronet or the Eevee evolutions only availible on the particular paths. As it is, the evolutions are locked up in HG/SS, which just does more to make the D/P/Pt set seem like the pinnacle of the games in that generation, which, since they were released first, means the makers of HG/SS messed up.

So, yeah, they are still good games. They just fail in almost every way compared to what we had in D/P/Pt. As a sequel to Gold and Silver, it works great. As a sequel to the entire Pokemon series, these games are kind of a let down.