#dppt remakes

[cosmosully]

she’s coming

[akitsuart]

One of my favorite pieces of Pixel Art. When I look at this image, I can't believe I could make it in just a couple of hours.

[themetallicnemesis]

Little girls and giant eldrich beings

[zephyrcookiez]

strawbewy!

[angz]

DPPT, man I love that game

but damn that price tag with that graphics

[plutinya]

I did art for the announcement of new remakes ! 🥰

[lovetchi]

in celebration of dppt remakes !

[chimeraan]

Diamond and Pearl remakes never needed to be made (the originals are fine) but the internet kept demanding they be made because of the Ruby and Sapphire remakes. Now it’s coming, made by a third party studio and looks nothing like the other remakes which was part of the reason people kept asking for them.

Honestly as well the remake looks bad, I know it’s probably not done yet but jesus it doesn’t hold a candle to the original at the moment. Which is a really bad sign because really the two major things you can improve in a remake like this is the accessibility (inc updating ancient gameplay standards) and the graphics. If the graphics don’t make everyone immediately go, “Wow this is such an improvement over the original” or is a creative take on the old designs it’s probably doomed. For comparison here’s DPP on the DS:

And here’s the remakes

(Apologies for the lack of gifs but you can watch the trailer and see for yourself)

Unfortunately the remake actually makes the sprite work of the originals look even better by comparison since at this point Gamefreak got really good at making simple yet detailed animated sprites that read really well and look super inviting and fun. The colours are bright and poppy in the original whereas the remake looks bland and dour. They were also utilising the new power of the DS to already render buildings in 3D so they pop out of the landscape but in the remake they’re just not a noteworthy part of the environment. In fact they kind of sink into the environment. Thanks to the DS’s hardware as well the sprites for the individual Pokemon looked really full and detailed. I’d even argue this influenced the designs for a lot of the Pokemon (especially the legendaries) since they were able to make more detailed Pokemon without losing recognisability to lack of graphical fidelity:

As for accessibility, if you go back and play DPP you’ll quickly be able to tell that the games haven’t moved on much since then in terms of gameplay or features. The originals hold up extremely well and were actually where a lot of the newer design streamlining of the current games began. In terms of raw gameplay DPP marked the physical/special split which has continued in the series so what attack stat (Special Attack and Attack) a Pokemon uses is determined by their selected move not the move’s typing (Before this a Dark type move would have been special no matter what dark type move a Pokemon selected). So there’s not actually much to improve on there.

In a round about way I almost feel bad for the studio who made the remake because the internet kept demanding these remakes and some manager must have said “Well I guess we have to now that’s just free money” but there’s just not much to improve on like there was with RS or even much of a reason to. For example the battery on GBA RS game’s internal clock has stopped working, so timed mechanics (such as the daycare and certain evolutions) in those games just don’t function anymore which goes a long way in justifying a remake. But in DP the game used the DS’s system clock for those mechanics because it’s really a modern JRPG and the creators had enough experience to know what to do with it. While Ruby didn’t have bad sprite art the games had moved on in a lot of ways since then design wise. But there’s just not as many good justifications for the DPP remakes, they’re still really solid games, it’s just not as easy to buy them I guess.

This is all to say I think people should really reassess what they’re really asking for when they ask for remakes and stuff. Because Nintendo could have just put the original games on the EShop and that would have been time and resources spent better than this remake. I really hope everyone learns their lessons from this and no one starts asking for Black and White remakes soon because those games are just ridiculous in how good they look and how far Gamefreak took their sprite work and how well they blended 3D and 2D elements together.

(Seriously they were just flexing at this point)