5 Good Things Pokemon D/P Gave Us

I doubt I'm the only one in the fandom world that thinks that Pokemon's 4th generation, concerning Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum versions, was a little less than satisfactory to its general audience.
I bought Pokemon Diamond, excited for the adventure, but found it very hard at places to actually continue. It didn't really seem worth it to me. While I have actually completed the Elite 4 challenge in Diamond, I'm still left with a slightly sour taste in my mouth. Others will agree; the release led to Pokemon gaining a little less-than-great reputation, one that would last until the release of Heart Gold and Soul Silver, where they made a nice apology in the form of cute little Pokemon following you about and making the 2nd generation remake my favorite thus far.
Still, there are certain things that the 4th generation provided us with that I can safely smile at. I wrote out the statistics at about 1am, so please bear with me. Let's begin.

#5 - Dawn/Hikari

Pedophiles, be quiet for a moment.
Alright, so you have 6 female trainers to choose from in your Pokemon playage. I've got them all lined up above in order (sorry for the lopsidedness): You've got Kris (Gen. 2), May (Gen. 3), Leaf/Green (remake of Gen. 1), Dawn (Gen. 4), Lyra (remake of Gen. 2), and Hilda/White (Gen. 5). I will forever be a Kris fangirl, and don't understand why Lyra had to take her place, but if I had to chose a second place, it would definitely be Dawn. Her attire is no more or less skimpy than the others, so I will say nothing about her physical appearance, but what what I will say is that she looks the most normal of the female trainers. Yes, yes, Leaf doesn't have the extremely bent hairstyles that the others do, but Dawn's simply works.
She's the sweetest female companion of Ash's, in my opinion. I never watched much of the anime when it was running on television, but when I did see it, she was usually a cute, bubbly klutz learning about the world of Pokemon, and that just made me smile. She also, in my opinion, looks to be the only of the 6 who looks relatively 10-years-old. This is an assumption based on what you experience in the first game, but I always thought your playable trainer was supposed to be a 10-year-old Pokemon prodigy. That's not what I see when I pull up my trainer card. I see ladies, not girls.
But enough controversy on that.

#4 - The Poketch 

Alright, wait a sec before you start throwing stuff at me. This concept took a while for me to get used to. This generation was of the first sort for GameFreak to release on the Nintendo DS, so they were experimenting with what to do with an extra screen, and for what they tried, I'll give them some brownie points. I still call this thing a PokeWatch, simply because the name is...corny. When I first acquired this little device in the game, I was instantly reminded of the PokeGear from the 2nd generation, but way more in-your-face.

It had apps that you could download from people or events throughout the game, and made it interesting to see what you could attach next to the little thing. A lot of the apps were useless, in my opinion, varying from a calculator to a drawing pad to a counter to a little coin flippy thing. I never used the Poketch for much to begin with, but some of the apps had their beneficial quirks. It was useful to use the step counter to help me know when the hell my eggs would ever hatch instead of just riding my bike up and down...and up and down different routes until the egg surprised me. The dowsing machine app also came in handy. Though I rarely knew when to use it, the items I would uncover were usually pretty useful, like potions and healers. I think the real reason I like this device is because I constantly knew what time it was. I like to play Pokemon when I'm supposed to be asleep, and sometimes it escapes me to remember to look at my cell phone to remind me what time it was. Yes, you got to set your clock a lot in the games, but with the PokeGear, you had to actually open that up, and I never remembered to do it, so this device was annoying in the long run, but useful all the same.

#2 - This Tune

Hey, easy. I know that Pokemon's soundtrack doesn't get a whole lot of credit in the later generations, but this tune pleasantly surprised me. You experience one of the lakes very early in the game, so early that you encounter your first Pokemon and acquire your starter on the shore of the lakes. When I first played through this portion, I was like found it really serene and quaint, but your journey didn't lead you to the lakes again until much later on in the game.
I'm no musical expert, but this track is surprisingly good, compared to some of the other town music you encounter in the game, so I give it a hearty thumbs up.

#3 - New Evolutionary Stones

The majority of your evolutionary stones were already set out from the very beginning. You had water, fire, thunder, leaf, and moon stones that were easily purchased at the Celadon Dept. Store for vastly expanding your Pokedex. Then generation 2 brought about the Sun Stone and the Everstone, two that I didn't find a lot of use in, since, during the 2nd generation, you could only evolve 2 Pokemon with the Sun Stone, and the Everstone was simply used if you were on an epic nuzlocke adventure.

Then generation 4 came about and was like, "HAI, come evolve some more of your Pokemans!"
Now you've got the ones already listed, plus the dusk, shiny, and dawn stones. These made me smile a lot, I must say. One great thing I loved about these new stones is that they added evolutions to previous generation Pokemon who weren't meant to evolve in the first place, such as Murkrow and Misdreavus (Dusk), while others altered the evolution of previous generation Pokemon, such as a male Kirlia evolving into a Gallade instead of a prissy Gardevoir. This was a nice step forward in Pokemon, and since they even used these stones in the 5th generation, you get badass Pokemon such as Chandelure. ; w ;
Phew...anyway.

#1 - GAR-FREAKING-CHOMP

If you had the patience enough to brave Wayward Cave and find/catch a Gible, you were pretty much set for the rest of the game. Its base stats could easily compete with the other demi-legendaries, and its two types made it an interesting team player. Plus it's a freaking LAND SHARK...dragon...that can learn SURF.
It took quite a bit of grinding levels to get Gible to evolve into this creature, but it's definitely worth the pacing in an awkward cave.
I could go on for a good deal longer about Garchomp, but I don't want to make this blog post too long, so I'll let you go out and seek him out yourself.

My apologies for the random blog post instead of another chapter, but this started burning in my heart to tell, so I'm going to tell. Hopefully it was worth the read. :'D