Really great game and glad that I finally got around to playing it since TTYD is one of my all time favorite games. You can see the frameworks of TTYD everywhere with how some of the partners act and feel as well as the chapter lay out and overall game mechanics. The really back tracking heavy side quests were apparently something they felt necessary to bring to the sequel. The most obvious weakness I saw in this game was that the story and characters were not as strong as in TTYD. Partners especially had less personality and also just less usefulness inside battle. My main issues with the battle mechanics was the badge system is very limiting in this game with it capping out at 30 with some of the better badges being 6 spaces each, but oh well it gets fixed in TTYD.

I went into this very excited to finally replay Gen 4. This has long been a generation that I have not liked Gen 3 being my fav made this feel like an immediate downgrade especially because of how slow the battle engine. I was ready for a new console to have this sped up and maybe I would have liked it more. Unfortunately like most of the recent remakes like ORAS it is missing features present in third games of a generation Platinum in this case. Team Galactic is such a non-factor outside of platinum they kind of just get brushed aside and their 'dungeon' is super short and not really hard at all. The battle engine is also still really slow!! Like what the hell why is everything so slow to attack even the menus move strange. The movement on the map is also really strange with it feeling like a 2d map with 3d movement leading to me constantly bumping into narrow walls and constantly having my vision blocked by trees/houses/etc. Overall this has only solidified my dislike for Gen 4 and also my disappointment in recent Pokemon remakes.