So you might be wondering why I’m reviewing this game six months after its release. It’s because I didn’t want to buy this game. From trailers and footage alone I saw no reason to spend 60 bucks on this game. I already have platinum and found no reason to play this over platinum. The only reason I played it at all is because I borrowed it from my brother. I decided to spice the game up a bit by playing it as a nuzloke which made it more fun in the short term but had little effect long term. I’ll explain in a bit. Overall I would say that this game was pretty unsatisfying and mediocre, and that’s being generous. Here were my biggest problems.

The difficulty. I had low expectations for the game’s difficulty but even those were shattered. The main reason this game is so easy is because of the EXP share, I was constantly 10 levels above the trainers and around 3 levels above the gym leader’s ace pokemon, the only time my levels caught up with the trainers was in the later parts of the elite 4. It doesn’t start off bad, I’d say it gets at it starts to get out of hand around the third gym. And like many have pointed out, it cannot be turned off, you are forced to play this way. Needless to say, I was one-shotting damn near everything in my path. The second big factor is the friendship gimmick, now this didn’t start to get invasive until really late in the game, but I was going out of my way to not trigger it. The friendship gimmick has been around since gen 6 but, like the EXP share, it was optional, here it’s a requirement. The only way to stop it is to go out of your way to make your pokemon hate you by giving them bitter herbs which is a real hassle. Now I’ve gone on and on about how easy the game is, which I’m sure everybody has heard before, but what I don’t see people talking about is the massive difficulty spike in the elite four. I blazed my way through the game but once I reached the elite four….well I lost the nuzloke. It’s truly bizarre that the game goes from fluffy and easy to relatively difficult right at the end. I would have liked this a lot more if the whole game had a relative difficulty and not this massive spike right at the end. I’d argue that the elite four in this game is harder than in the original, for one, all of their pokemon have items, and two they actually have strategy, for example flint’s drifblem will set up minimizes and then baton pass to infernape, hell the drifblem doesn’t even have any attacking moves ( it has will-o-wisp, strength sap, minimize, and baton pass). I actually would have liked to see the gym leaders, barry, cyrus, and the others use some type of strategy, it likely would have made the game a lot more fun in the long run. 

Wired choices and OG game baggage. The reason why people wanted remakes of diamond and pearl is because it was assumed it would include the changes made in platinum (similar to the crystal content in HGSS and the emerald content in ORAS) but this game is just a copy of diamond and pearl with very little changes. There are only two of note, the grand underground and contests. Contests have been turned into a rhythm game and while I have not taken part in them myself I have heard it is a pretty bare-bones rhythm game. As for the grand underground I think it is a pretty decent upgrade over the original, the big thing that I would like to see changed is the encounters, it doesn’t feel like there are many special pokemon of note un the grand underground, the rare spawns spice things up a little bit but I think more could have been done, if the encounters you get were the same as the ones you get after unlocking the national dex it would have made the game a lot more fun and it wouldn’t have made teambuilding so limited. Speaking of those rare spawns, it brings me to my next point, even though you can get pokemon like gligar and rhyhorn in the main game you can’t get their evolution items until the post game, something that was solved in platinum but was regressed here, they could have easily put a hidden razor fang in the same place they did in platinum, or made it an item that can be purchased using the currency in the underground. But no, guess who has to fight cynthia with a gligar on his team, and guess who’s favorite pokemon of all time is gliscor….yeah. So they give you the option to get these pokemon but you’re going to be stuck with a gligar or a rhydon for the entire game until you can get the items in the postgame, a problem that was already fixed in platinum! 

Those were my two main points but I want to leave this off by saying that I played through heart gold right before my nuzloke and the feeling I got at the end of both games was entirely different, in heart gold I felt accomplished and proud of myself, here I felt tired and drained. If you want the best gen 4 experience play platinum, it’s by far the better game and it’s likely going to cost less anyway. Or if you don’t have a DS play legends arceus instead, that game is genuinely fun and enjoyable to play just don’t support bland boring schlock like this. It feels bad to say this, diamond was the first pokemon game I ever played but this game just felt empty, the best thing I can say about it is I’m glad I didn’t pay for it, I’d probably be much angerier if I did.