all games are not created equal

Even though Prof. Layton is a simple puzzle game, I enjoyed it a whole lot more than I am currently enjoying Pokemon Diamond, and it's because of one thing: pacing of gameplay. 

Pokemon Diamond is deep down a fun game where you can adventure around and do a ton of things.  But what really kills it is the battles and how long it takes.  In a battle, sometimes it just takes one move to kill off an enemy, but because of all the random wasted seconds here and there, it can take something like 30 seconds from battle start to end to hit an enemy once and kill them, and this is with all of the extra effects turned off.

This would normally be ok.  Only problem is that in the game, you are always fighting.  Wanna go from one place to another, well, you might have to go through some tall grass and oh no, some crappy wild pokemon is there to waste your time.  I really do want to enjoy the game, but when I have 25 minutes on the train to work to play, I want to be able to play the game and not sit there waiting for the battles to finish.

Prof. Layton was for the most part great for short trips.  You could pull up a puzzle and work on it for what time you had.  The only times where it just felt like you were wasting time was when you had to search around for puzzles.  Even then, it wasn't nearly as aggravating as all the wasted time in Pokemon Diamond.

If I could breeze through a one-hit battle in 5-10 seconds, Pokemon Diamond would be a great game.  But since I can't, I'm having a really hard time making myself finish the game.