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.
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.