The fourth generation of the Pokemon franchise was revealed to the world in 2006 with the release of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl and the reception was, at best, underwhelming. Diamond and Pearl quickly became 2 of the least loved games in the series, with fans citing issues on everything from a mediocre storyline to a boring region.
As a part of the company's 25th-Anniversary celebration, the games are being remade as Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl for the Switch. Since this doesn't appear to be a one-to-one copy of the original game, there is an opportunity to make a few much-needed improvements. Here are 7 major issues from Diamond & Pearl that need to be addressed in the remakes.
7 Region Aesthetics
Sinnoh is quite possibly the most boring region in the entire Pokemon series aesthetically. There is a glaring lack of uniqueness when it comes to the way locations look. Every area has the same trees, the same ground tiles, the same colors, and there is basically no attempt at creating different lighting for areas. Mt. Coronet and Eterna Forest, for example, use the same generic bright lighting, which doesn't make sense for the type of area they are in.
In Platinum, the interior of Mt. Coronet is noticeably darker and more somber-looking, to fit the cave aesthetic. Eterna Forest has the light of the sun/moon shining through the leaves of the trees above you, giving the area a totally different feel.
By far the most offensive example of this, however, is the Battle Zone. It's supposed to give off a tropical and vibrant vibe compared to Sinnoh. unfortunately, it looks exactly the same as Sinnoh. There are very few unique assets in the area. Stark Mountain is supposed to be a volcano, but there's no way you would know that without the game telling you, because it looks like every other cave/mountain in the game.
6 Limited Regional Dex
Diamond and Pearl's Pokemon type variety is absolutely horrible. There are only 2 Fire-types, (one of which is the starter, meaning if you don't pick it you'll never get a chance to find one again) 2 Ice-types, 3 Electric-types, and only 1 Non-Legendary Dragon-type. This leads to type experts (Such as Candice, Volkner, and Flint) using Pokemon that do not match their type theming at all.
Even worse, while the Regional Dex has a whole bunch of new evolutions for older Pokemon (such as Magnezone, Tangrowth, and Gliscor), only Mismagius, Honchkrow, Roserade, and Weavile actually made it into the regular game. The rest are all unavailable until after you become champion. Did the developers actually want players to use these Pokemon or not?
5 Game Speed
There are many things that combine to make the game speed agonizingly slow. First, HP bars take forever to deplete. In the early game, this isn't too bad, but as the Pokemon gain more HP, the worse the problem becomes. The surfing speed is so much slower compared to all of the previous games. It makes navigating any water route in the game a slogfest.
It also doesn't help that in battles, the game has to "think" about almost every action (a Move animation, using an item, a Pokemon fainting) before it actually performs it. While this seems like a minor thing, over the course of this 20+ hour-long adventure, it adds up.
The general area designs also seem pretty bent at taking forever to finish. They have you doing things like smashing a rock, walking a few steps, smashing another rock, walking a few more steps, smashing another rock, and so on. The worst example of the slow area design is Route 217. Not only does it have a thick blizzard making it difficult to see, but the route's gimmick is that it's covered in deep snow that slows down your movement speed, in a game that's already unnecessarily slow.
4 Level Curve
Diamond and Pearl's level curve is bad, and there is no better example of this than the endgame. The final Gym Leader's highest leveled Pokemon is 49, but the first Elite Four member's highest leveled Pokemon is 57. Ouch. That's an 8 level difference when you've only had 1 route and Victory Road in between the 2 battles, and it only gets worse from there.
The first Elite Four member's lowest leveled Pokemon is 53, but the champion's highest leveled Pokemon is 66. That's a 13 level difference for 5 battles that are all in a row. The level curve is way too steep for normal gameplay and makes the endgame bosses unnecessarily frustrating.
3 Over Abundance of HMs
HMs are specific moves that you can teach your Pokemon to perform an action outside of battle, such as surfing, smashing a rock, or cutting down trees. The problem here is, there are far too many of them. Sure, you have some strong ones like Surf and Waterfall, but then you have garbage like Cut, a move that only has 50 base power and has a 5% chance to miss (meaning it pales in comparison to Return), or Rock Smash, a move that only has 40 base power, making it very weak just in general.
It doesn't help that HMs are permanently stuck in your Pokemon's Movesets until you have access to a special move deleter NPC, whose ease of access varies depending on the game. Having 1 or 2 Pokemon in your team most of the time specifically to use these moves is almost a necessity since there are just so many of them.
2 Gym Pacing
It takes an incredibly long time to get to the 4th Gym Leader after beating the 3rd one, but once you do beat the 4th one, Gym Leaders 5-7 all come up at a rapid-fire pace, until you have another decently long gap to get to the 8th one.
This makes gyms 5-7 feel incredibly rushed as they all just come and go without any real attention being given to them, and the extremely long gaps where you don't have a gym just make the game's already awful speed feel even more terrible. Platinum fixes the gym pacing tremendously, so hopefully, the remakes will adapt its pacing rather than Diamond and Pearl's.
1 Trainer AI
The way AI works in Gen 4 is that there are 8 different difficulties they can be set to, with 0 being the easiest and 7 being the hardest. Pokemon set to AI 0 select moves completely at random with no thought or strategy being put into their decisions, while AI 1 makes it so Pokemon won't perform actually useless actions (Using a Normal-type move on a Ghost-type, for example), and the rest of the settings just further increase the intelligence of the Trainers and Pokemon from there.
Here's the kicker to all of this. Not a single trainer in the entirety of Diamond and Pearl, including the Champion, has an AI set to a difficulty higher than 1. Yes, you read that correctly. Trainers in this game are so rock bottom stupid, that they will completely pass up an easy KO when you're low on health, in favor of spamming a status move or something else equally nonsensical.
This was fixed in Platinum, but this is so baffling when you consider the fact that earlier gens of Pokemon had more competent AI than this, so how this became a problem in these games specifically is beyond explanation.