Top Ten Most Annoying Things About the Generation IV Pokemon Games
Much like the previous list, this covers the most annoying things in one particular generation of Pokemon, this one being Generation IV, the other generation I am most familiar with. This covers Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver.Above all else, getting Munchlax in D/P/Pt is INSANE. You have to use the honey tree mechanic, and I'll outline it later on in a different item, however with Munchlax, you have to figure out exactly which of FOUR pre-determined honey trees will have a Munchlax, do the thing to slather honey, and hoping you get the 1% encounter Munchlax if at all. It's truly ridiculous the lengths you have to go to to get one that the easier method is to breed a Snorlax with a Full Incense.
So as I said, the honey tree mechanic is definitely on here and will be second in my list. You first need honey, find a yellow tree, slather it with honey, and wait six real-world hours (so no changing the DS clock) then return, and if you wait way longer you miss your chance at a specific Pokemon. Speaking of, many specific Pokemon are hard to get even with this mechanic, notably Heracross is the second rarest encounter, and then there's female Combee which is also a pain due to its gender ratio. The most common mons to get are in the Wurmple family, and you can get these elsewhere. And even so, the mechanic in and of itself may just not attract any wild Pokemon at all!
All of Generation IV's games are much slower in pace compared to the previous generations, especially in Gen-3. The running and surfing speeds in this game are much slower than previously, and there's far more usage of HMs in some of these games. Also in some of the games there were swamp or snowy areas where you can fall into holes and have to wiggle out, which could lead to a wild encounter while you're struggling to leave. Even the battles are much slower paced frame-wise. For Pokemon with high-HP the time for the HP to go down after an attack is just so long.
What a shame that a de facto Water move most players use has a chance of hurting allies in double battles when it didn't do that previously in Gen-3. It makes using Surf risky if you care about your ally in double battles. Though there are still alternatives, like Muddy Water still only targets both foes, and Waterfall is now a physical attacking alternative that only targets one foe.
This one is just infamous because many people outright EXPECT the Haunter to evolve, but it's got an Everstone. And the trainer even tells you about it AFTER it happened. No wonder there's an entire Reddit dedicated to hating this one NPC.
Another infamous example, while Whitney's Miltank did debut in Gen-2, both of the above two things this item mentioned didn't exist yet. But Miltank is a lot harder and nastier due to these two things. Having a Lum Berry means you must hit it with a status condition twice, and Scrappy allows it to bypass Ghost type's immunity to its Stomp.
Deals with Cheryl, Mira, Riley, Buck, and Marley in D/P/Pt. Personality-wise these characters are great and offer a crutch in that they heal you after every battle. However they are annoying when you're trying to catch wild Pokemon because first you need to get rid of one of the wild mons and then have to catch the one left over. Problem with this is your battle partner just wants to KO what you want to catch sometimes. Those doing challenges like Nuzlocke know that this is a problem.
Who would have thought that finding Feebas was STILL A PAIN in Gen-4? It apparently is. Feebas can be found on Mt. Coronet, and once again, there are specific tiles to fish from. The maximum amount of tiles to find Feebas went from six to just four. The tiles actually change automatically each day too, so the hunting for one can actually take a lot longer. I'm not putting its evolution method to Milotic here by the way, since it's the same as before in Gen-3.
This one is interesting but it had a ton of flaws when it was first introduced. First, you can ONLY search Pokemon you have seen. The search results overall are quite limited. And many trade offers are quite ridiculous. Game Freak has taken steps to make things easier for players at least.
A bit of a minor annoyance since most players will already end up doing this but of course there are always some of the annoying straggler Pokemon that you end up missing and they usually are quite rare. Luckily, every single non-legendary Pokemon in the game shows up at least once by at least one trainer, but if you're actively skipping trainers you can miss out on some of them (like Drifloon).
This is of course pertaining to Nintendo Event stuff, which is now no longer a thing obviously, but back then even this thing, which is used for Arceus in the Gen-4 games, was never actually distributed. Unlike other event-exclusive items. Junichi Matsuda said that players might be confused to its use, and that's why it wasn't distributed.