Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum (2006, DS)
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl (and the 2009 counterpart, Platinum) exist at the apex of Pokémon games. In the fourth generation, things were more user-friendly than they were in earlier games. The Pokédex was at a manageable level, with mere hundreds of Pokémon to collect and train, rather than nearly a thousand. There also weren’t any extraneous features—let’s take another second to rain on Super Training and Mega Evolutions—to distract from the core formula. It was all about the battles. The only thing Diamond and Pearl lacked, through no fault of the games, was the nostalgia factor.
