>>58034462Yeah, roamers that flee via Roar despawn from the game entirely. Also, in RS and FRLG roamers have a glitch that keeps most of their IVs at 0, so even if you snag the roamer it's at best just a trophy for the dex. If you wanted a good legendary dog for the Battle Frontier/gen 3 competitive you needed to get it from Colosseum. That's why there's this massive community effort around RNG manipulating specifically Colosseum.
And the minigames existed to shill the wireless adapter, which came packaged in every new copy of FRLG, like how the Pokewalker came with every copy of HGSS. The adapter wasn't a big hit and very few games actually used it, and it's generally not reverse-compatible as a replacement link cable. Trading via wireless adapter in FRLG works like the gen 4+ trading: You both enter a lobby as a random trainer, talk to each other, and request a trade. Trading via link cable works like gen 1-2: You both enter the trading room and sit down at the trading terminal.
So it was all a beta test for how the DS would later implement these features to a greater extent.