The Magic Tower genre is definitely that way, and Soulestination moreso, because it has a lot to consider from the mechanics. For example, the Soul system.

You have a capacity of Soul, and for each soul you collect, you increase your stats by 1%. When you get to your cap, you enter a state of Rage - doubling your strength, and being forced to attack any adjacent enemy. This can be good for bosses or removing multiple enemies at junctions from play. However, this resets your Soul pool to zero, and increases your capacity by 1. This means it takes longer to become enraged, but your power potential also increases.

In the Magic Tower genre, the timing of your actions is everything, despite being turn based. Changes in stats dictate which kinds of enemies you can afford to encounter. The defeat of enemies is both a price and reward, so you have to engineer bargains. For example, glass cannon enemies are exceedingly deadly, but if you can strike them down in one blow, everything behind them is a deluge of goodness. But emphasizing attack means that sturdy enemies can take their time tearing you apart.

I have never played platinum, but from what I gathered it is significantly improved compared to Pearl/Diamond. Those are really painful to play.

They're really clunky and repetitve, but the worst part is mon distribution. There are barely any fire types in the games, to the point the Fire-Type elite 4 has only 2 in his 5 mon team. And one of them is the evolved fire starter. There is literally no other fire type obtainable at that point.

They decided to keep most of the diversity in the post game (lots of old species that get a new evolution mostly) so until you get there it feels like you're meeting the same twenty different pokémon over and over again.

Bonus : Diamond has one dark-type easily accessible before psychic gym (which is already well into the game). Pearl doesn't have any. Its only dark-type comes in very late game. It's like nobody checked these games' balance.

My partner filled their DEX in Sun and Moon, the last game with every single pokemon!

I did not even come close hahaha. I focused on making an incredible IV/EV team instead.

It was just me being very stubborn really.

Technically I went a bit further since I got full Sun/Moon dex next (though if I remember correctly not Ultra, I was missing one or two of the new Ultra Beasts).

It probably was just the right time really. The DS gens (4-5) are forever compatible because they just need local wifi to transfer. But 5 to 6 (and 6 to 7) need the pokémon bank and thus 3ds e-shop. I am not sure, but unless there is a third party way to do this, I believe that DS-3DS link would be broken today. And it's probably too late to transfer them to Switch through... Pokémon Home? I think? Is that still a thing?

And I did that right on time for that mythical pokémon distribution, because even in the past games they were only distributed in time-limited events. So I'd have no other way to get most of these.

Except for Mew. Pokémon Ranch on the wii had a way to get a Mew if you had Diamond/Pearl and transferred ONE FREAKING THOUSAND POKÉMON from it. So, of course I did it, like an idiot.

It became unlimited in HG/SS, which made it easier, but also more annoying for me when I had Platinum as my hub, because it meant I needed to catch a bunch of junk to trade over to my SS if I grabbed a Pokémon from the GBA games.

Such is life.

Although there are emulators that support loading the GBA games on DS, so if you want that pal park experience you can have it properly even on emulator.