Hit an art and style block so bear with me.I also wanted to finish the Diamond Remake before I start

Hit an art and style block so bear with me.

I also wanted to finish the Diamond Remake before I started on Arceus which I know ppl love, so here’s my beautiful final team <3 Lots of blue and purple in the Sinnoh region. 

Real talk tho, this was by far the most mediocre cash-grab Pokemon game I’ve ever played 8’) and there’s a full rant below. I’m not normally this critical of Pokemon but they really dropped the ball on this one.

Alright look I’m not an expert on how games are made alright so if I’m mistaken on how hard something is to put in the game or other info or details let me know. To get it out of the way, I played the whole game until the credits and I DID enjoy myself for parts of it, but I was still overall very disappointed and frustrated. My favorite thing about it that I absolutely loved tho was this tree. The model for this tree is perfect and I was always happy to see it. 

So this game wasn’t made by Game Freak, they outsourced it to ILCA. Which is I think is FINE for spin-offs or mobile Pokemon games like Unite but a REMAKE of a MAIN SERIES GAME? I was going into this game REALLY giving it the benefit of the doubt after ppl were shitting on the graphics because I loved the original Diamond and Pearl but bro…I was suffering.

Graphically the game is just a shiny new coat on the old DS graphics. Except it’s not pixel art so it’s not as charming. Like some of the polygons are crisp and nice but then Cyrus’ G logo on his shirt is just a low res jpeg. The bobbleheads look bad and emote rarely and when they do it’s like D8 … (: and no in-between, it looks cheap as hell. I just don’t understand why they didn’t take the time to do what they did with the Hoenn remake. Despite me originally thinking it was super easy and not as good as I had hoped, I really appreciate it now.

They updated the story to include some of Emerald’s plot PLUS added new characters and content to incorporate it into the newer canon, they updated the look of all the major characters and gave the villains more personality and used the more realistic human models that weren’t super chibi like the original games which was exciting to see! All the gyms got aesthetic updates and a lot of the locations were made more visually interesting. The legendaries got new forms, mega-evolving from the concurrent XY games was included…you could fly around the region in the sky on a Pokemon which was gimmicky but fun and unique to the game! It was the old game but really polished up with new style and gameplay updates of the newer versions! It improved on most of everything in the originals.

Brilliant Diamond is just a STRAIGHT remake; just the same thing but slightly better graphics. They didn’t include any significant features from the third game PLATINUM which had ALREADY fixed stuff that was in the initial two versions. They could have put in more of Platinum’s plot dude come NO DISTORTED WORLD??? That part SOLD me on Platinum alone. They’re using TILE GRAPHICS for all the trees and flat planes for the mountains that extend into nowhere are you kidding me, they’re already walls you can’t pass thru so just make them look unique and like a real forest or something. All the buildings are spacious and DEVOID of anything interesting to obtain or look at. No little neat background details; it was fine back then but they looks so EMPTY in this 3D style. They just translated EVERY TILE EXACTLY HOW IT WAS. But also you can move in any direction now with the joystick but they didn’t widen some of the one tile spaces you have to go thru and you get STUCK. No one thought about that, I had to EXPERIENCE it

No gym leader or character revamps and believe me they needed it dude these 2004 outfits look like trash. Especially Team Galactic they look like clowns XD Everyone deserved an updated look but nah. You can pick your trainer’s hair and skin color at the beginning of the game but you can’t style anything else so it’s just Dawn but she’s blonde now. They include SOME new outfits for your trainer avatar in ONE city but the options are SO limited that its like why bother. And the Platinum outfits are an event only thing and not included? Come on man I just missed it ;_;

They let you walk around with your Pokemon outside the Pokeball but the ai and weird proportions of your Chibi trainer make it just bad. I didn’t give the Let’s Go Kanto remakes a lot of credit either but they were a LOT better than this. Their Ai was decent and the Pokemon were all size accurate so it was neat to see them with you. Also you could ride some of them!!! Again, they put in story elements from Yellow with more focus on being cinematic. They had gimmicks like throwing pokeballs like in PokeGO and letting you have a special Pikachu/Eevee that’s always with you and you can pet and dress them. And they ALSO use the more realistic and detailed LOOK of the modern games! No new places, no new gimmicks in Brilliant Diamond and Peal.

The game is also glitchy and buggy enough for ME, a filthy casual, to run into a BUNCH of them. The framerate drops and animations stop and go at real rough times which I normally DON’T even care about in video games because I enjoy the exploration and atmosphere most but here it just didn’t stand a chance with all the NOTHING around it. There’s also a bunch of gameplay elements mashed together from newer and older games with like no thought. Like how HMs are now TMs but TMs BREAK AGAIN??? And HMs make wild Pokemon help you so you don’t waste move slots but its always the same bidoofs and biberals even if you’re in like a cave and I can’t even use HMs with MY Pokemon if I actually WANT to? WHY CANT I SURF ON MY EMPOLEON HE’S MY BABY.

And why isn’t wondertrading an app on my Poketch? Are you seriously telling me I have to go to the GTS and I can’t just do it from wherever I am that’s something they introduced in XY which was like TEN YEARS AGO it’s EXPECTED NOW Why is my Poketch not an Apple Watch, it looks like a TI-84 calculator. 

And I know Game Freak were probably busy with Arceus and Scarlet/Violet and blah blah blah but they really should have put some fucking care into this game or just not released it until later. They probably did it BECAUSE they were working on Arceus which is in ~Ancient~ Sinnoh but they SHOULDN’T HAVE. This is giving me SONIC vibes with how rushed and bad this game is. Sorry Sonic fans ;_; a lot of your games have a bad rap. The IDW comics are good tho.

And I KNOW Game Freak and Pokemon catch a lot of flack for their games and I’m usually VERY forgiving because I love Pokemon and I know they like their small little team and I’m willing to empathize with that but this was really disappointing even for my standards and I can’t hide it. Don’t offload these games on other studios who are just gonna make THIS LAZY JUNK. I know you have only 150 employees but you make POKEMON. THE BIGGEST FRANCHISE IN THE WORLD. So hire MORE PEOPLE and make ME A GOOD REMAKE WHILE WORKING ON YOUR COOL NEW GAMES.

Also this game is $60. If this is your quality at least make it like $30. It’s basically the same game from 2004