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.
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.