I think I ended up having more fun with this than I realized only because I’m a huge Gen 4 fan and my nostalgia for Sinnoh is crazy lol
This is a very half-baked low effort disappointing remake for a number of reasons. The chibi art style for one. I thought I would get used to it over time but I never did. This game just looks bad. Like, REALLY bad. I criticized Sword and Shield for having incredibly rough unappealing visuals but Brilliant Diamond somehow manages to look even more low effort in comparison. And the worst part of it is that oftentimes the game likes to swing the camera to get a new angle of a scene, or zoom the camera in on certain characters to like, highlight a dramatic event and it just…doesn’t work at all. All you see are these lifeless static puppets that just stand there as their low resolution mouth and eye textures just kind of blip to a different form to convey emotion, and you can forget about trying to be serious and have intense story driven moments with these things on screen - it just ain’t happening. The framerate even manages to tank in the overworld in certain areas (like in Pastoria City). The backgrounds and models for battles actually look fairly nice but I think I speak for most DPP fans here when I say the entire game should’ve been like this. Surprisingly the water actually looks really good. Like it’s weird and I’m kind of going off topic here but I was taken aback to how pleasant most forms of water you skim across look in this game and how it reacts to your movement.
I think the biggest issue I have with this remake is that it’s TOO faithful, and it’s not even being faithful to the right game. The original Diamond and Pearl weren’t uh…very great games? Platinum literally came and fixed/improved EVERYTHING that was wrong in DP on TOP of adding new things to do and redoing the story adding more behind the Team Galactic boss as well as new characters in general. But no, it’s DIAMOND we need to be faithful to. That means the team comps for gym leaders and elite 4 are borked, fire types are sorely lacking unless you head to the grand underground, the story feels half baked with barely anything going on, no battle frontier, no minigames to play, no Distortion World, none of that. They even didn’t bother adding the second button on the Poketch that Platinum added, meaning if you skim past a poketch app you want to use you gotta scroll aaaaaaall the way through the apps all over again. It’s basically just a souped up version of the original Diamond and Pearl, with some of the conveniences of modern Pokémon sprinkled in like the much faster battle system, experience share (forced of course), no mandatory HM traversal, and access to the PC box no matter where you are. No reusable TM’s though, we’re back to the Gen 4 days in all the stupidest possible ways, because we gotta be FAITHFUL bro! The HM solution is kind of awkward though if I’m honest. It’s still slow and you just call a random wild Pokémon to perform the action for you. I mean it works but I honestly prefer the ride Pokémon from Sun and Moon. I also thought forced experience share would make the entire game trivial like it did in Sword and Shield, and while for the most part that is true, the elite 4 and the champion ended up being legitimate challenges despite that. I guess they were the only things the exp share was balanced around. However the biggest pill to swallow is that it is an EXACT square for square remake of the original. This also means the new analogue control they’ve added doesn’t mesh well with the level layout at all, so if you aren’t pixel perfect on aiming where your character goes, you end up bumping into walls and sliding alongside ledges a lot of the time. And no, using the dpad didn’t help because of how stiff and unnatural the dpad controls feel, it’s basically analogue control or bust.
I’m on and off about the Grand Underground changes. On the one hand the cave system is cool, the digging minigame is still fun, and the statues are fun to collect and put up in your secret base to nab bonuses for catching specific Pokémon, but the statues aren’t a replacement for the actual secret base customization being gutted nor are they a replacement for minigames being gone either. Contests are just a straight downgrade, they cut out 2 sections that were previously there and only gave us the rhythm minigame portion and nothing else.
Unlike Sword and Shield thankfully, the post game actually has stuff to DO. Besides the run of the mill battle tower, you have a ton of legendaries to collect, rematches with all the gym leaders and the elite 4 all with MUCH stronger Pokémon teams than before, the Ramanas Park, nothing outstanding but I’m glad they gave us something at least
I just honestly don’t understand why they decided to make this game like it is now. Did TPC see Gen 4 fans as this ravenous angry mob and that if they didn’t give them the EXACT SAME GAME they played when they were a kid, they would tear them apart from the inside out? I think at least a little change would be appreciated. I want to believe we could see an actual Platinum remake soon but…this is it. This is all we get, probably for good.
I’d still recommend sticking with Platinum over this
This is a very half-baked low effort disappointing remake for a number of reasons. The chibi art style for one. I thought I would get used to it over time but I never did. This game just looks bad. Like, REALLY bad. I criticized Sword and Shield for having incredibly rough unappealing visuals but Brilliant Diamond somehow manages to look even more low effort in comparison. And the worst part of it is that oftentimes the game likes to swing the camera to get a new angle of a scene, or zoom the camera in on certain characters to like, highlight a dramatic event and it just…doesn’t work at all. All you see are these lifeless static puppets that just stand there as their low resolution mouth and eye textures just kind of blip to a different form to convey emotion, and you can forget about trying to be serious and have intense story driven moments with these things on screen - it just ain’t happening. The framerate even manages to tank in the overworld in certain areas (like in Pastoria City). The backgrounds and models for battles actually look fairly nice but I think I speak for most DPP fans here when I say the entire game should’ve been like this. Surprisingly the water actually looks really good. Like it’s weird and I’m kind of going off topic here but I was taken aback to how pleasant most forms of water you skim across look in this game and how it reacts to your movement.
I think the biggest issue I have with this remake is that it’s TOO faithful, and it’s not even being faithful to the right game. The original Diamond and Pearl weren’t uh…very great games? Platinum literally came and fixed/improved EVERYTHING that was wrong in DP on TOP of adding new things to do and redoing the story adding more behind the Team Galactic boss as well as new characters in general. But no, it’s DIAMOND we need to be faithful to. That means the team comps for gym leaders and elite 4 are borked, fire types are sorely lacking unless you head to the grand underground, the story feels half baked with barely anything going on, no battle frontier, no minigames to play, no Distortion World, none of that. They even didn’t bother adding the second button on the Poketch that Platinum added, meaning if you skim past a poketch app you want to use you gotta scroll aaaaaaall the way through the apps all over again. It’s basically just a souped up version of the original Diamond and Pearl, with some of the conveniences of modern Pokémon sprinkled in like the much faster battle system, experience share (forced of course), no mandatory HM traversal, and access to the PC box no matter where you are. No reusable TM’s though, we’re back to the Gen 4 days in all the stupidest possible ways, because we gotta be FAITHFUL bro! The HM solution is kind of awkward though if I’m honest. It’s still slow and you just call a random wild Pokémon to perform the action for you. I mean it works but I honestly prefer the ride Pokémon from Sun and Moon. I also thought forced experience share would make the entire game trivial like it did in Sword and Shield, and while for the most part that is true, the elite 4 and the champion ended up being legitimate challenges despite that. I guess they were the only things the exp share was balanced around. However the biggest pill to swallow is that it is an EXACT square for square remake of the original. This also means the new analogue control they’ve added doesn’t mesh well with the level layout at all, so if you aren’t pixel perfect on aiming where your character goes, you end up bumping into walls and sliding alongside ledges a lot of the time. And no, using the dpad didn’t help because of how stiff and unnatural the dpad controls feel, it’s basically analogue control or bust.
I’m on and off about the Grand Underground changes. On the one hand the cave system is cool, the digging minigame is still fun, and the statues are fun to collect and put up in your secret base to nab bonuses for catching specific Pokémon, but the statues aren’t a replacement for the actual secret base customization being gutted nor are they a replacement for minigames being gone either. Contests are just a straight downgrade, they cut out 2 sections that were previously there and only gave us the rhythm minigame portion and nothing else.
Unlike Sword and Shield thankfully, the post game actually has stuff to DO. Besides the run of the mill battle tower, you have a ton of legendaries to collect, rematches with all the gym leaders and the elite 4 all with MUCH stronger Pokémon teams than before, the Ramanas Park, nothing outstanding but I’m glad they gave us something at least
I just honestly don’t understand why they decided to make this game like it is now. Did TPC see Gen 4 fans as this ravenous angry mob and that if they didn’t give them the EXACT SAME GAME they played when they were a kid, they would tear them apart from the inside out? I think at least a little change would be appreciated. I want to believe we could see an actual Platinum remake soon but…this is it. This is all we get, probably for good.
I’d still recommend sticking with Platinum over this