>Removed all Platinum content (Trainer teams, Gym layouts, Pokémon variety, E4 Rematch, Battle Frontier, Distortion World, Map/Puzzles, Villa, Improved narrative)
>Removed Secret Base customization
>Removed Game Corner
>Removed 2/3 Contest minigames
>Removed numerous Online Features (GTS, Draw, Egg Spin, Mix Battle, and Platinum’s poffin cook, minigames, WiFi Plaza, and WiFi Club)
>Removed GBA-insert Pokémon encounters
>TMs are finite, but EXP Share is forced, PC is now portable, and HMs are removed
>Level curve is FUCKED as a result of forced EXP share https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tUdDSA11xo
>Following Pokémon receive affection buff (increased EXP, dodge chance, crit chance, attack, remove status conditions, and ability to survive moves that would faint you)
>Game is poorly optimized and crashes at random https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=320&v=308IkypGo9A&feature=youtu.be
>Horrendous presentation, trainer models just snap in place
>Music is STILL trash midi, the trailers were doctored
>Copy and pasted animations from XY/SS that aren’t faithful to the DPPt animations
>Non-existent Pokémon scaling
>No Ranked Battles, no new battle modes
>No real new content like FRLG, HGSS, and even ORAS all got
>$60 game (DPPt was $40)
>$50 online (DPPt’s was free)

It’s over. This is the worst mainline Pokémon game ever released.

Pokémon Diamond and Pearl are some of the most important releases for the franchise as they were the games able to reverse the trend of declining sales since Gen 1 and prove the series as more than just a passing fad. A remake of a pair of games with so much importance to so many people and I’m happy to say that this one delivered on every front: awesome new content through the revamped underground feature and Ramanas Park, various quality of life improvements that the originals desperately needed, a charming new artstyle that gives the game a distinct feel, and a much welcome return to Diamond and Pearl’s unique localization that was sanded down in the transition to Platinum. The definitive version, hands down.

I honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about with this game. There are specific things that bother me about it like forced easy-mode features like affection bonuses and EXP Share, and I do wish they carried over more stuff from Platinum, but even considering that, this is a great remake and easily one of the best Pokemon games in recent memory. The region looks great and is better than ever to explore thanks to no longer having to load up my team with useless HMs, the remixes are all sick, and the expanded teambuilding options via the Underground are appreciated and a much needed improvement to the meager DP dex. (Although I do wish they did a bit more in that regard - I miss Rotom and Porygon-Z.) I dunno if I can conclusively say this game is BETTER than Platinum, but at the very least, I don't think I'll be going back to that game unless I'm in a really nostalgic mood. For their first game and considering the evidently tight deadline they were up against, ILCA did a great job with this one.

siiiiiiip*
>It doesn't need a charmanderino
>it doesn't need to look good
YOU ARE HERE
>It doesn't need swarms
>It doesn't need the Trophy Garden
>It doesn't need Amity Square
>It doesn't need the Pokeradar
>It doesn't need the Pal Park
>It doesn't need Pokeseals
>It doesn't need the Gamecorner
>It doesn't need Pofins
>It doesn't need Super Contests
>It doesn't need the Great Marsh
>It doesn't need the Distortion World
>It doesn't need the Battle Frontier
>It doesn't need more than 2 Fire Types for the whole game
>It doesn't matter if Pokemon aren't scaled properly
>It doesn't matter if only Kanto mons get regional forms
>It doesn't matter if the battle backround doesn't match the overworld
>It doesn't matter if the Battle Area is DLC
>It doesn't matter if Mt. Coronet or Victory road are hallways
>It doesn't matter if Barry's animations are reused from Hop or Hau
>It doesn't matter if Rotom is the new Poketch
>It doesn't matter if new gym leader rosters are 3 underleveled Pokemon
>It doesn't matter if the E4 wont have full teams or held items
>It doesn't matter if everything outside the original Sinnoh dex is DLC, aside from a gifted Charmander
>It doesn't matter if several legendaries are gifted to you/captured in cutscenes

This is a graphical upgrade to one of the better Pokemon generations, but instead of adding or expanding anything, or even just adding the stuff from Platinum, it was made to be extremely loyal to DPPt, and that is extremely disappointing. The Pokenav is obnoxious unless you are in handheld, the cutscene zooms are hilariously awful, and the shift from chibi to normal size is jarring to say the least.

The updated OST is nice, and the Gym Leaders + Elite 4 had strategies which is a small improvement. The Grand Underground is still fun, but making it the only way to get Platinum-added Pokemon before you beat the main game is straight up obnoxious.

My advice is to stick with Platinum unless you don't have a system that can play it, as even the small upgrades are not worth the full price on one of the most boring remakes Pokemon has had to date.

I feel like the keyword here is baffled. Why skip out on of all Platinum's additions and changes, including massive things like the Distortion World even when it's an active detriment to the game? Why integrate the EXP Share as a permanent bonus, when it has been toggleable in every game prior? Why remake these games at all, if you were going to play it so safe anyway? It's all very baffling to me.

I suppose some QOL changes here and there, and all sorts of other tweaks make it a better experience than the original Diamond & Pearl, I still did enjoy myself - but a better version existed then, and a better version exists now.

an inferior remaster of an already inferior game. why anyone would play this instead of just emulating platinum is beyond me, much better experience and art style. i wholeheartedly believe that this is the worst mainline pokemon game and it isn't even close.

i also wonder why they even made these games in the first place if they were going to do them like this? past pokemon remakes at the very least refreshed the characters with new designs that are mostly better other than a few hgss and frlg characters (the latter was rectified with let's go of all things) and actual new content to enjoy, and in the case of hgss and oras they adapted the content from the third version into the story pretty well but still in a mostly new way. brilliant diamond and shining pearl are just remakes of the sinnoh games with less content and less quality without adding anything of note from platinum or to set them apart from their originals.

an emulated port of pokemon platinum would've been infinitely preferable to whatever the fuck this is supposed to be

As one of the two pairs of mainline titles I haven't played in the Pokemon series (the other being Sword & Shield, which I'll get to soon), I almost felt obligated to check this one off so I can finally rate and rank it among the other games. I played Brilliant Diamond on emulator with hardcore-Nuzlocke rules, to try and make things a little more interesting.

Uh, this thing sucks? What I got was an uglier, boring rehash of a game I played almost 20 years ago. I think we all knew this was gonna be a turd when it was initially revealed, with series sole developer Game Freak handing it off to a fucking storage app developer, not to mention its absolutely heinous art direction. Not to give too much credit to Game Freak as a competent developer, but maybe a little credit where credit is due when the first mainline title released by someone else was the roughest, buggiest launch until maybe Scarlet & Violet. Also hurting its initial reveal was it being announced alongside Legends Arceus, which looked much more interesting and also turned out to be exactly what the stagnant franchise needed at the time.

A very common, irritating defense I've seen of BDSP from its few defenders is that it's a "faithful" remake. I guess? It's convenient that it picks and chooses where and what to be faithful, including plenty of modern day QoL updates, like updated effectiveness tables, the Fairy-type, and tons of Pokemon that weren't included in the original Diamond & Pearl pre-postgame in a totally new, upgraded Grand Underground. But then ILCA decides to be faithful in the worst ways - Diamond & Pearl's asinine gym leader & Elite Four teams (the Fire-type Elite Four member has the majority of his team not Fire-type), a vile chibi-styled art direction that I think is attempting to translate the DS sprites into 3D but look laughably bad in HD, and an incredibly bland and boring "remastered" soundtrack that has no life to it.

Previous remakes, namely, FireRed & LeafGreen, HeartGold & SoulSilver, and Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire, took the games they were remaking and brought them forward to meet the standards of the current generation they were in - Kanto reimagined in the style of Hoenn, Johto reimagined in the style of Sinnoh, and Hoenn reimagined in the style of Kalos. They brought new story elements, new gimmicks like Mega Evolution, fun redesigns of iconic characters, and wonderful remixes of classic tunes. BDSP does absolutely none of this, providing the absolute bare minimum of a functioning product (failing even that at launch) and basically has nothing in this that would intrigue a Pokemon fan to play it over the originals or the superior Platinum version.

Countless arguments against the game have been made and there are literally too many issues to list - the barely remixed soundtrack not even being in the game without the day one patch, follower Pokemon that are horrendously scaled to the massive chibi player models, lack of any content from Platinum being among the biggest - but my biggest issue is that these are literally just worse versions of Diamond & Pearl. As contentious as ORAS have become over the years, at least they tried something new? Like, they made those games distinct from Ruby & Sapphire. What the hell is the point of playing BDSP? To fill out the Sinnoh Pokedex on modern Switch hardware? Legends Arceus, arguably the true Sinnoh remake, accomplishes this exact thing in a game that's unique and fun to play.

All of this and more has already been said. An utterly pointless, useless, soulless piece of corporate slop that even Game Freak couldn't be assed to bother with. As Pokemon fans, we're in the unfortunate position of just kind of having to take what we can get (completely unacceptable for such a large IP, but that's a different convo) and BDSP fails to reach even that incredibly low bar. Fuck this game and everyone who defends it.

Diamond and Pearl have always been shit pokemon games. Terrible battle speed that is outpaced by drifting icebergs, HORRENDOUS regional dex with piss-poor pokemon selection, terrible fucking HMs that are used constantly to navigate the overworld, bland locations, jumping the shark outrageously early with legendaries that bend the fucking space-time continuum and a literal "god" pokemon that is just a goat stuck in a fence.

Does the remake fix any of this? Well, a bit. The speed is much nicer for sure, thank christ but everything else I bitched about prior still exists. Ponytas for days on the overworld because the devs literally fucking forgot to make fire pokemon for this gen. Oh boy there's a Houndour/Houndoom in the underground! But some idiot decided to laugh their ass off and still put fucking five hundred Ponyta in there for me to kill before stumbling upon a Houndoom or Camerupt that I couldn't even catch.

In addition, I know this is mostly a "me" problem. But the fact these assholes decided to keep Eevee to post-game after Platinum fixed it makes me want to slap the fucking tazzmission on every single one of those responsible for that decision. Fuck'em.

The overworld movement is ass, you can either stick to the classic grid-based movement that somehow feels clunkier than the old games or use the 3D movement assuming your stick isn't drifting, but now your bus-sized hitbox will get stuck on every obstacle known to mankind making certain narrow passages an annoyance to traverse.

The Poketch makes zero sense to include, because you get it then fumble around to get rid of it cause it takes up the top-right of the screen and then forget about it. Just shows how little thought was put into these games.

The chibi style graphics are fine....at least in the classic view, but for reasons only known to Buddha himself they decided to have the camera give the player whiplash by suddenly zooming into enemy trainers/NPCs and giving you a front-row seat to how low quality the models are. They should've just stuck to the original view, the camera angles are all terrible and their snappy movement makes them even more annoying. The in-game battles look good though thankfully.

Diamond and Pearl are bad, but a remake could've made it a lot more stomachable and BDSP only makes it slightly better while introducing other problems making it feel like a weird two steps forward with one step backwards. Unfortunately the streak of lack of effort continues in the modern age of mainline Pokemon entries.

So I finally completed this game. Honestly I dont really know why i did. I must of felt some sort of obligation since its a pokemon game, but I cant really say I enjoyed it. Its a very faithful remake to Diamond and Pearl which are some of my least favorite games in the series. They do change a few things here and there, but they omit all the new additions in Platinum that made the game so much better so its kinda just unnecessary all around. The new artsyle is fine I suppose, but if they were gonna go chibi they should of full on committed to it. The water physics are gorgeous though. Some of the music is really good, while other tracks are kinda just mediocre and occasionally straight up bad. Battles still feel pretty slow but they're improved overall. Honestly I dont really have much to say about this. It's kinda pointless overall. Its not terrible by any means, especially if you never played the originals but It just didnt do anything for me, I wont be going back for post game content. It does give you a free Mew and Jirachi though.

Pokedex Entries - 50
Time Played - 36 hours 15 minutes
Nancymeter - 50/100
Game Completion #28 of 2022
March Completion #7

Am I blinded by nostalgia? Perhaps I could be but I genuinely am having really fun with this game. On release night, here I am looking around my room at 3am in the morning, surrounded by my really close friends. Diamond and Pearl on DS was our first group Pokémon experience and here we are still playing and hanging out all night, hours flying by easily. Don’t think there’s a game that could bring us close together like Pokémon does. In our adult life, sometimes we can have a hard time keeping up with everyone, so I’m very grateful that Pokémon is something we can all do together.

Man... I think this is gonna be the first mainline Pokemon game that I don't finish.

I love Diamond & Pearl. They are hugely nostalgic games for me (shout out to my original 300+ hour Diamond save file), but this ain't it. The graphics are actually quite nice (aside from the frequent extreme closeups on expressionless chibi faces), but the free 3D movement applied to grid-based level design is atrocious here just like it was in XY - I keep getting caught on invisible hitboxes, so the world is just unpleasant to navigate. The permanent EXP share takes all of the fun out of teambuilding - there are Pokemon on my team that I've never even used in battle because they are disgustingly overleveled, and that's even with skipping almost all trainer battles from Eterna Forest onwards. And with BDSP being based on the SwSh engine that's missing tons of moves, some Pokemon that were fun to use in the original DPPt are just kind of deadweight now due to their unbalanced movesets. The extremely confusing choice to revert TMs back into one-time use items while making HMs into both single use TMs and overworld field moves is genuinely baffling. There was also zero reason not to at least use the expanded Pokedex from Platinum as the base for BDSP - the original just unnecessarily locks out some of the most memorable Sinnoh Pokemon like Gliscor from being obtainable before the postgame. And while exploring the Underground has been made way more fun via the Pokemon dens (probably the only part of the game I legitimately praise as a unilateral improvement), they gutted the secret base decorating aspect! My cave is now full of lame, bland statues instead of being a cozy hideaway with a giant neon GTS globe as a centerpiece.

Idk man, this just...sucks. It's not fun for me. It's so faithful to a fault but clumsily so that I'd rather just play the original Diamond instead. Hopefully Legends Arceus is good.

I think a huge issue with Pokemon is that, no matter what there is always a good time to be had playing it. Because of this, I think who ever is in charge of making decisions is blinded to faults and lets sheer laziness get in the way of good ideas.

Any Pokemon game is fun. But it doesn't mean that they are good games. This game shipped a buggy mess and unfinished. That is insane in its self but to be honest after all the fixes, it is still so messy. Models misbehave, the camera sometimes leaves my character behind, I constantly glitch into walls and corners. Even the originals didn't have these problems.

What confuses me if why the people who decide that get 4 would be remade this way was what people wanted? People obviously wanted gen 4 but with SW engine. They didn't want strange time capsule messes.

There was so much talk about being faithful remakes. That was obviously just said as an easy copout for Platinum content. These games have new moves, new types, following Pokemon, no gts, no actually secret bases, reduced ribbons from the contest hall, no letter seals. That whole list is just from the top of my head but that doesn't make this game faithful. And why would you want to do that anyway! Why would you want to make a faithful version of a game when the better version (Not my words, but game freaks calling them 'enhanced versions') exists. It just reads to me as the people who make these decisions are out of touch with what fans want.

I did have fun playing this, I love the contests but I miss the role playing elements from platinum. I want to have my own villa where I have my berries growing outside. Then when I have watered them I can pop down to my secret base. I want the battle cafe back so I don't have to repeat the gym puzzles every time I want to rematch the leaders.

And then on top of that, add more! Battles with Lucas/Dawn, in game events, small new areas like a berry field, let your whole team play in amity square.

It leaves fans in a difficult place now because there are now 3 completely different versions of this game to play, with platinum and BDSP both having strengths and weaknesses and you now have to choose between them.