Dandy_

I've been playing it everyday since release. It's bit hard to put a score on the game (as it is hardly a game) but I'll try. To start, it's an essentially an idle game that rewards you for "good" sleeping habits. You sleep, meet Pokemon in the morning and cook meals/gather berries during the day to increase your next night's sleep score. The music, the art and the sleeping animations are genuinely wonderful, unique and always super high quality (if scarce), which is somewhat rare for this franchise. If you dedicate enough time to learning this game, you'll learn soon enough that yes, there is a meta for Pokemon Sleep and that optimizing your teams makes the whole difference. The problem is the "game" part is done verly poorly IMO. In short, sleeping the max amount (8 hours 30 mins) is optimal for a good night score (let's you catch rarer/more Pokemon), maximizes rewards (i.e points to buy Poke Balls and other crucial items) and your Pokemon's energy (basically linked to how much they can increase your score in a day). If you couldn't sleep well, forgot to track or the game decided you took 5 hours to fall asleep, tough luck! You're screwed out of rewards and encounters for the day. Sleeping at the same everyday is also rewarded and "optimal", which is unrealistic for most people. Another thing I believe is also a pretty poor design decision are sleep styles. Basically, your night's sleep is going to be categorized into one of three styles. Pokemon are usually limited to one of these styles, so going after specific Pokemon is pretty hard. Of course, you can't really change the way you sleep, so you end up seeing the same mons every morning. Some people have resorted to manipulating the game for that reason. It's also massively RNG heavy. Each Pokemon has a specialty, main skills, sub skills and nature. Except for the specialty and main skill, ALL of these are RNG, so you can imagine how fun it is to catch a good, permanent team member, or just a barely useful Pokemon for a species that you like. And like I mentioned, it's not guaranteed you'll even meet that Pokemon in the first place OR that you'll catch em. Pokemon have essentially bars made of points that fill up when you give em Poke Ball cookies. The better the ball, the faster it fills up. Of course, they decided that the Pokemon can just get "full" randomly after one Poke Ball cookie. Again, a very fun experience. To all this, you might say, that it might be my fault for trying to no-life this game. Unfortunately, optimizing your team *is* really the game here. That's all you really do besides feeding and catching Pokemon, which is mostly brainless. The real "fun" is trying to find the best combination of team members for that week's Snoralx and island, switch up members at times, and maximize your score. Yes, the sleeping Pokemon are cute, but I wouldn't consider looking at them "game play". TLDR: Art is great, rewards unrealistic sleeping habits, gameplay/progression is extremely RNG. Only recommended for casual play.

Compared to the previous mainline Switch entries, it's decent! I'm surprised the reviews are that low, especially since the base game is no where as offensive as the DLC. As far as the game goes, graphics are not bad at all, runs perfectly well on the Switch 2 (the bar is low I'm aware), battles are fresh (granted you need to actually interact with the mechanics, this isn't a turn based game) and the story has its moments, especially if you're a lore nerd like me. Music (even if repetitive at times), characters and new Mega designs are mostly good. As for the bad, my number one gripe is the forced day/night cycle. The fact that it throws you in a loading screen no matter what is super frustrating. The game just loves interrupting you and breaking the flow of the game. The writing is also generally pretty unserious, and just kind of bad at times. The new Megas are fine, but I'll put this in the bad section as well because there are some big misses (the ZA starters are one), some big obvious ones are missing (Talonflame? Aegislash? Goodra?) and frankly, not as much as there should be for a $70 Switch game. The environment is a big one people have complained about and I mostly agree, but I can't say it ruined the game or anything for me. Content-wise, it's slightly on the low-end for me, but again, inoffensive. Overall, the base game is inoffensive to me, in somewhat positive ways. Frankly, biased because I don't remember the last time a Switch Pokemon game felt that smooth and I'm happy that Megas are back. 6-7/10. DLC is a strong 3/10.

Coming from Bethesda, this game just kinda feels like a demo of what it wanted to be. The planets that were designed by people feel a bit shallow, and the infinitely generated planets are completely worthless. Definitely regret spending so much time on it. The starship stuff is cool though.

Low-production value, literally two new characters, maybe one new environment, super grindy, pretty boring gameplay loop, tons of RNG... It just feels like paid post-game as the game doesn't totally feel "finished" without it. And this is coming from someone who mostly liked base ZA. Even at half the price I'm not sure it would be worth it.

Extremely underrated gem - If you're a Pokemon fan, you're definitely missing out. Give it another try if you were turned off by the awful launch. Fully F2P friendly. I've typed out a full review but I'm getting 404'd for some reason.

TLDR: Worse than the originals. Tons of missed potential. Overall worthless. Play Platinum. I'm a massive gen 4 fan, and these games are worthless. Pokemon Diamond is by far the most important game of my childhood and the one I've made the most memories with. To be fair, I would've preferred something in the ORAS style (granted I still dont like those games) so it might not be fair to compare them to actual remakes, but I still want to mention how pathetic these games are. So, I'll try to judge these games as "faithful remakes" So in trying to stay faithful: -They added the awful new friendship system which trivializes battles -Said system also slows down battles -HM system still way slower than should be (still useless text for Rock Smash, Cut, etc) -Following Pokemon are back and still lag behind and are generally buggy -Following Pokemon also make it hard to interact with ground items or HM blocks -Actually REMOVED content from the Battle Tower (yes, from Platinum, but there was no reason to at least bring that back things that made those games objectively better) -Subjective, but overall uglier than the originals. The translation to 3D using the chibi style from the originals did not land at all for me. And of course, the use of those 3D models again for the Pokemon. Seeing new sprites back then was always a treat. Nowadays, it would be a **** blessing, but I'm going off track here. -General lack of polish (which also slows down the game at times) The biggest complain your hear about DP was the speed, and even here they couldn't get that right. The speed was the ONE thing they needed fix. Reminder, these games are EASILY ACCESSIBLE through emulators. There is NO reason to play this over Platinum using literally any device you like through an emulator. So for me, the decision to make these faithful remakes instead of something at least interesting like ORAS is crazy and yes, even with PLA coming out almost at the same time. At the very least, they could've remade Platinum and fixed the above. Just tons of missed potential over all, even as a low-effort """faithful""" remake. The best thing about BDSP is that they provide a base for modders to build something actually worthwhile upon.