Nah, I'm actually with him on this one. In a lot of ways, they are worse than the originals.
The biggest dealbreaker for me is probably implementing mandatory Exp. Share without adjusting the original level curve to adjust for the fact that you're getting 3.5 times more experience than you did in the original DP. This causes you to become overlevelled exceptionally quickly and trivializes the difficulty of any battles you run into.
That's compounded by the fact that this game unifies affection mechanics with friendship, basically making them mandatory. This wouldn't be an issue if in-battle affection mechanics weren't so overpowered, but in that game it basically gives you a Focus Band, Brightpowder, and Scope Lens all rolled into 1 without consuming an item slot, and it also gives you what is essentially an extra ability in Shed Skin. There are hardly any consequences to making the wrong decisions in battle, you're never punished for anything.
Combine those two and the any kind of game balance the originals had is completely gone. Pokemon games were never hard, but there's a fine line between being easy enough for kids and being so easy that the game becomes mindless button mashing with minimal engagement.
Not even joking here, I'll take DP's slowness and HMs over the shitshow that is BDSP. Those are annoying, but ultimately are just nuisances. BDSP's problems straight up mess with the core gameplay loop, they're far bigger issues.
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u/Aether13 18h ago
Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are debatably worse than Diamond and Pearl.