Pokémon Brilliant Diamond - Nintendo Switch

NOTE: This is a review for both Brilliant Diamond AND Shining Pearl. Sadly a continuation of Sword and Shields backwards direction in taking Pokemon. While the graphics are shiny and updated, and the music remastered/remixed, the Diamond and Pearl remakes fall short in about every way. Lets go over some of the main reasons why I did not enjoy them. Cons: - Everything is the same. Excluding the Grand Underground, which is interesting for about a half an hour, the new games field absolutely no changes to the story or characters. You could place down your old DS next to your switch and play the original Pearl or Diamond and you would be playing the exact same thing. At least when they remade Ruby and Sapphire they added in new things and made it more interesting, while expanding on characters and story elements. This game does none of that. - Far too easy. Unfortunately, just like Sword and Shield, these games feature an automatic experience share that quickly causes your Pokemon team to outpace and out-level almost all enemies. By the end of the game every fight was an absolute joke and required zero thought or skill. Additionally, your Pokemon will now do random things such as shrugging off attacks, scoring extra critical strikes, and even expelling negative status conditions from themselves just to please you, making battles skewed in your favor even if you werent over-leveled. The original Diamond and Pearl were a good challenge, with a powerful set of bosses and a terrifying final boss. These games are... well for little kids basically. There is really no challenge to be found here whatsoever. - No Platinum features. Platinum took Diamond and Pearl and improved on pretty much everything. It revamped enemy teams, added new Pokemon, new items, and generally expanded the game. However none of that is present in this game. Enemy teams are still the dull lineups of the original games that often dont even match their theme. Why is it that several gyms feature trainers with Pokemon that dont even fit the theme? Did they really HAVE to keep the team line-ups from Diamond and Pearl? The only caveat to this is the Grand Underground, which seems to allow you to catch certain Pokemon that were available in the platinum expansion, but none of the enemy trainers in the game will use these. - Generally bland. Somehow, just like the original games, combat is on the slow side, taking a good chunk of time between each action, and causing you to yawn while you wait for abilities and statuses to trigger. The graphics are nice, but simple. Nothing can be taken seriously in the chibi, cutesy style, and there arent many cut-scenes or chances to see things in more standard graphics. - Not great controls. Now that movement is not aligned to a grid, it can be quite wonky. It can be hard to aim your character and get them to walk exactly how you want, and even more annoying to try and take quick exact turns while riding the bicycle. Additionally, without a touch screen, the poke-tech now requires a separate menu that must be selected each time you want to use it, and takes up the whole screen! You must then also manually move around a cursor to click on things. Its very tedious and altogether annoying to use. The hotkeys for key items are also in odd locations and feel weird to use. Pros: No HM requirements. One of this games few saving graces is that it no longer requires you to teach Pokemon on your team the Field moves required to complete the game, which allows you to keep your Pokemons move slots free for whatever you wish to use. However, this is no longer very helpful now that the game is so easy. Neutral: - Contests. I have never messed with Pokemon contests so I cannot comment on whether they are improved from the original or not. Verdict: Overall just a mess. These games could have been so amazing but they are a complete letdown. I will give them 1 extra star above the minimum because they do both look and sound very nice, but in the end I just did not have any fun playing them. It really felt like a waste of my time and money. If you are on the fence then stay away. If you want any kind of challenge then dont buy these, and if you want to return to your childhood nostalgia, then go replay the original Diamond and Pearl, or possibly Platinum. Any of those 3 are better than these new games.

All these five star reviews are a joke and created by NPC. A 1:1 ratio of this game with the current player controls just does not work. Getting stuck on random objects throughout the map? Poor game design that could have been fixed with one small player-material added. If X&Y (released in 2013) mastered the free movement with the analog stick and then snapping back to the last grid based tile while using the directional pad was flawless and worked without any issue, I would have hoped that a game 8 years later would have the same design philosophy. It does not. Instead of snapping the player to an entire tile, the developers thought it would be a good idea for the player to snap to the nearest 1/8th of a tile. This causes way more issues than it should. First issue being with the cliffs the player jumps off of. You absolutely have to walk to a corner or reenter an area to realign yourself. If you are not perfectly aligned with the grid, you will jump off the cliff every single time even when its not apparent youre close enough. For some reason when walking near doors, the player will automatically walk into them even when just passing by. This forces the player to go into unnecessary buildings. The entire chibi art should have been dropped and used with gameplay and graphics from Sword and Shield with updated textures and models. For a company called ILCA (I Love Computer Art), they did a piss-poor job on making this game look good. How does Pokémon Colosseum (released in 2003) look and PLAY, hence the PLAY part, much better than something that came out 18 years later? The overall gameplay was very, VERY questionable during my entire time playing. Pokémon level up together using EXP share, that cannot be turned off. However, all the trainers and wild Pokémon are not scaled with the players Pokémon, thus making the game easy mode by default. Super contests have been completely watered down to a QTE; taking away any fun the game might have hoped to have. The underground tunnel was probably the only thing remotely enjoyable about the game - for the first 10 minutes. This quickly becomes a tedious and mundane task. The fact that they expect you to spend almost all post-game content farming for items in the underground tunnel is baffling to say the least. Theres nearly 300 employees working at ILCA right now, there is no reason why the gameplay should have been so neglected. There might have been polish put into the graphics, but there was little-to-no effort put into the polishing of the gameplay itself. As long as Game Freak allows any company besides themselves make another Pokémon game, I will refuse to spend money on it. After taxes, this games final price is $65.72. For something that should have been a max of $30 at launch, I truly feel robbed. I have been playing Pokémon games since Pokémon Yellow was released and have never been more disappointed with a Pokémon game itself, and this is coming from someone that occasionally plays Pokémon Channel once every few years.

So, pokemon BDSP, eh? Some people like it, most people hate but, but let me tell you as someone who has never even touched a gen 4 game (theyre way too expensive, even back in like 2014) I had quite a bit of fun with it. Its no masterpiece, but it pretty much is the gen 4 experience you all remember down to each and every mechanic and line of dialogue. However, the original Diamond and Pearl games for the Nintendo DS, released in 2005, have many mechanics many believe to be frustrating and unwanted. This includes the slow gameplay, (mainly animations and HP bars, along with surfing) overuse of HMs, and an incredibly small pokedex until post game, so much so that there are only two fire types in the game, one of which being optional. These problems have all been fixed in this remaster. (Its kinda hard to call it a remake) HMs are now permanent menu options available at all times, making overworld travel a lot easier. coinvent, and most importantly fun. The game engine has also been completely redone, causing animations to run much faster and battles to flow a lot easier. And for the lack of available Pokemon, dont worry! Many mons from the original game that were neigh-impossible to catch have been made much easier to obtain thanks to the reworked grand underground, now featuring a large variety of Pokemon to catch along with mining for items and fossils. In short, if you liked the original Diamond and Pearl, youll like this. And if you didnt like the originals solely due to the annoying mechanics and gameplay problems stated above, all of them have been fixed. However, thats not the main point of this review. This game has received SCATHING criticism from the incredibly toxic Pokemon fanbase, calling it the worst remake in history and crap like that. Now, for the rest of the review, there will be heavy spoilers as I will be defending this game against its most common criticisms. This will include post game spoilers. You have been warned. First of all, many people complain that its too faithful to the originals and that they wanted graphics in the style of SWSH, (not chibi) they wanted new content like ORAS delta episode, they wanted mega evolutions, etc. But heres the thing. This is supposted to be a FAITHFUL REMAKE, more of a remaster than anything else, reworking gameplay, updating graphics and sound, and adding QoL. And you know what PEOPLE COMPLAINED LIKE CRAZY WHEN ORAS CAME OUT. You want to know why? Because it wasnt faithful AT ALL to the original GBA games Ruby and Sapphire. They have a plot that was like 70% original, completely redesigned every character, added in countless new post-game scenarios and sidequests, added crazy new lore, a whole new post game story in the Delta Episode, etc. But now people are complaining again because Nintendo gave the fans what they wanted back in 2015, a faithful remake/remaster than a full-on reimagining like ORAS was. Another criticism this game, BDSP, often gets is that they didnt add in the additional content added in with Platinum, the definitive edition of Diamond and Pearl released in 2008 for the DS. But the thing is, THEY DID. The game features all platinum-exclusive Pokemon and events within the game, no exceptions. The only things not included are the Battle Frontier (which hasnt been in the series since Platinum itself, most likely replaced by competitive battling) and the 15 minutes of extra story with Looker which really amounts to basically nothing. They even have the distortion world in the game as a special post-game dungeon, so youre not even missing out on that. Finally, the last criticism this game gets is that its too easy. This is mostly true, however, only to a certain extent. Unlike the original games where EXP was evenly distributed between all participants in the battle, now EXP is given to all party members in equal amounts no matter if they participated in battle or not, though ones that havent participated do only get 50% of the EXP. This was already very controversial when the choice to turn this feature on was added in Pokemon X and Y (gen 6, released in 2013 for the 3DS) and was made even more so when the feature was forced in Pokemon Sword and Shield. It also seems like that what fans called forced EXP share is here to stay due to its inclusion in both BDSP and the recent Pokemon Legends Arceus. However, this is far from an issue if the game is balanced around it. Pokemon SWSH was balanced around the new EXP formula, but due to the wild area in that game it was VERY easy to become overleveled and since Pokemon dont scale in that game you just steamrolled everything. Unlike SWSH however, BDSP is not nearly fine-tuned enough for Pokemon to match your level, causing you to become overleveled for a large majority of the game. Unlike the original games where for 90% of the game you are severely underleveled, in BDSP you are often extremely OVERLEVELED causing you to steamroll everyone especially since most gym leaders only have a max of 3 Pokemon. But there is one caviat to the games difficulty that changes everything, the final challenge, the elite four. HO BOY the elite four in this game are something else. Absolutely brutal from beginning to end, using actual competitive strategies with EV trained Pokemon and powerful and varied moveset. The final boss, Cynthia, is even harder than she was in the original game, boasting perfect IV and max EV trained Pokemon, competitive items, and viable movesets. She is a force to be reckoned with, and unless you either bring in a lot of items or grind heavily, she will absolutely body you time and time again. This difficulty spike when you hit the elite four is absolutely insane, and definitely turns this game into an incredibly easy game into one of the hardest Pokemon games to date just with the final challenge alone. So yeah, BDSP good, Pokemon fans bad. Goodnight.