GOTY 2021 mini reviews: pokemon brilliant diamond/shining pearl
Added 2022-04-28 17:54:39 +0000 UTCThis is a quick one. Part of my (brandon's) continuing series of reviews for competitions. I played it for like 2 hours and shrugged, is the short version, but apparently some folks had a very different feeling about this one!
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This is a remake of the Diamond/Pearl DS games, which I played through (most of) back in the day. The original was actually the first pokemon I played extensively. What I'll say right off the bat is this *feels* like a remake. It feels like an older and clunkier game right off the bat, and doesn't feel like it's been updated for modern times particularly. On the surface it has, with new visuals and all. But those visual upgrades are not particularly impressive or expressive, and the chibi character in the overworld makes it feel even more "for kids" than usual. Likewise the "full-on teen" character you become in battles gives me a lot of dissonance and feels strange.
Everything else is just pokemon. I really don't think there's anything new enough, or interesting enough here to warrant consideration for an award. I do like pokemon games but I always wish they were better. I want them to be more streamlined, more player-friendly, less talky, or at least with more to say, and every release where they don't do that is a missed opportunity, especially an iterative one like this game is.
Is it in my top 5?
Nope. It really is a brushed up version of the DS game. This may sound hypocritical after I tried to convince everyone that Nier should make the list, but Nier is ambitious and was underappreciated in its time. This game is the opposite on both counts!
Comments
Yeah, they’re two-year games on a yearly schedule. I think they’ve been trying to fix things up by releasing “updated” versions like Ultra Sun that are just the actually finished game. Sword/Shield had a lot of creativity too - it felt like someone really cared about Not-England even if the localizations’ accents were halfhearted. But it’s just obviously missing stuff.
MVB
2022-05-07 07:32:13 +0000 UTCSun was the only one I (brandon) ever beat. I quite liked it, and thought the alolan pokemon were cool, and all that stuff! So especially after that this one felt like a step back. I gotta play that arceus eventually, maybe I'll be more into it. I feel like the usual suspects didn't talk about it very much, and maybe pokemon games are coming out too frequently, too close to each other right now?
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2022-04-28 23:36:54 +0000 UTCyeah, get some real writing in here, make it really player-friendly in terms of how movement, gating, etc work, bust out some real hot tunes... why the heck not!!!
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2022-04-28 23:35:08 +0000 UTCThere was some real “reinvention” in Sun and Moon where they also rebooted the TV show, or so I hear, but otherwise Pokemon games feel like they were designed in a week and released half-finished. I remember X and Y having great social features that were always-on and very fast, so of course they got rid of them and replaced it with an extra mode that took forever to enter/exit/use in the next one.
MVB
2022-04-28 21:20:48 +0000 UTCYea, I WANT to like these Pokemon games because there's just enough craft on display to suggest GameFreak knows what's up but they never go all-in? I don't think kids would stop playing Pokemon games if there was actual writing in them. Like, wouldn't it be cool if Yuji Horii wrote the script for one of these? I'm liking the mini-reviews, thanks Brandon.
Jodeaux
2022-04-28 18:01:33 +0000 UTC
