I have played most Pokemon games, but I am deciding between Pokemon Sun/Moon/Ultra and Brilliant Diamond.
I have never played either of these games not even their original versions. What do you think?
Additionally, is Sun/Moon good or is the Ultra version better?
Don’t play Brilliant Diamond, play Platinum instead, it’s much better in every single way.
You can use an emulator to get it up and running quickly.
As far as Sun vs Ultra Sun, I think most people prefer the original but I’ve never played them.
BDSP was a terrible remake that was farmed out to a random porting studio. It’s one of the lowest effort remakes I have ever experienced.
One of the biggest issues is BDSP added modern EXP share where all your pokemon gain EXP every battle.This caused a huge problem for BDSP because they didn’t re-balance the game to account for you gaining much more XP than the original developers expected. The game is completely trivial because you become unreasonably over-leveled when playing through the game normally.
Platinum also added extra content to gen 4 beyond the original Diamond and Perl. None of this content was added to the remaster. If you are wanting to play gen IV and have hardware that can run it, Platinum is the best choice.
BDSP are 1:1 Unity remakes of diamond and pearl, for better or worse. Platinum just had some small quality of life upgrades and both the legendaries.
Also, BDSP aren’t made by Pokemon Company, I enjoyed the games but artistically it’s just not Pokemon. If you told me BDSP was a fan game, I’d believe you. It’s cool to see a 3d chibi take of Pokemon but I love the art direction of the DS games far more.
Platinum came out a year after Diamond and Pearl, it made a lot of changes to the games. From the top of my head these are the most important ones:
- Expanded Pokedex from 151 to 210 or so pokemon.
- Revamped team galactic, changes their bases’ looks and adding tons of dialogue.
- Gym leaders, galatic leaders and elite four have improved teams due to the added pokemon.
- Improved sprites although this doesn’t really matter at this point.
- Added trainers that follow you and turn areas into pure double battles for a while.
- Improved the big showdown with team galatic and gave Giratina a role in the story.
I never finished Ultra, but the consensus I’ve heard is that normal SuMo has the better story, Ultra has the better postgame content and is at least somewhat more challenging. Which one is better really depends on what you’re looking for in a Pokémon game.
The others already answered your question, but since you said you thought pokemon games were too easy and you have a steam deck in other comments, I would recommend Pokémon reborn. It is a free fan game on PC. I play it on my steam deck and it is great for it. Just takes a bit of setup and configuration.
That game is challenging if you want something difficult. You really need to plan out your approach as only brute force attack moves will get you nowhere unlike brute forcing a normal Pokémon game.
Do with this information what you must.
I’d play Pokemon Platinum. Being able to still hack the events like Darkrai or Shamin (one of my favorite Pokemon events ever) is a huge benefit for the older games.
I’d say get ultra unless you care about deep Pokemon lore. The gameplay in the ultra games is just objectively better. Small QOL stuff like Emerald vs RS, but it’s still just simply better in some ways. However ultra changes the stories of the games for the worst, like it just doesn’t make sense at all.
I’ve played both Diamond and Brilliant Diamond. To be honest, I don’t get where the hate is coming from for BD. It’s got a ton of quality-of-life changes compared to Diamond. If you had the choice between the two, I would certainly recommend BD, especially if you’re used to the the QoL from the newer Pokemon games. Whether or not BD is worth the money is a separate question entirely… but at least that can be solved by consulting some online “vendors,” if you catch my drift
As for S/M and US/UM, what I’ve heard is that S/M has a more coherent story. US/UM apparently chose to abandon the story near the end and shoehorn in an incoherent ending, with the intention of using the new ending to build up a stronger post-story game. The choice boils down to whether you care about the story more or whether you care about the post-game content more
Well either way I’ll play on the steam deck, so not needing to switch between screens in a plus for brilliant diamonds.
In regards to s/m and us/um. What if I just want to beat the elite four which would you recommend? I’m not sure I care about the store or the post game content. I’m not even sure what post game content is, so maybe I’d care, but probably not.
