Pokemon Black & White remakes need to “solve” BDSP’s biggest flaws

Fans are expecting remakes of Pokemon Black & White, but fears about the quality of these titles are high, especially considering what happened the last time we visited the Sinnoh region.

The Pokemon franchise usually keeps one remake generation to a system, with the possible exception of the Let’s Go games. With the Switch’s successor confirmed by Nintendo, this means the chances of Gen 5 remakes are high, as they’re next in line.

While anticipation for the Pokemon Black & White remakes is high, the hopes of them living up to their source material are not. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl were harshly criticized by fans for being too close to their source material and ditching popular features, like Secret Bases.

The Pokemon Company

A thread on the Pokemon Reddit discussed fans’ fears for the Gen 5 remakes, with concerns ranging from Game Freak handing them off to another company, as it had done with ILCA and Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, and the unnecessary removal of features.

“People are expecting Unova remakes to combine both BW and BW2 when in reality it’s most likely just gonna be a halfbaked version of BW with little to no postgame content,” the author wrote. “Battle Subway gets removed, Dream World gets removed, and all you get is a hollow game that keeps the worst parts of “old Pokemon” while not adding any QOL.”

“Maybe they’re hoping Game Freak is actually the ones to do the remake instead of outsourcing it like they did BDSP,” one user wrote, while another said, “It is actually insane to me how they outsourced the remakes despite how absolutely undercooked all the mainline games are. Even Arceus only shines through its concept, while most stuff it offers feels like a tech demo really”

There were Pokemon players who put the blame on the feet of the Gen 4 games themselves, which means direct Gen 5 remakes will avoid similar issues.

“BD\SP are bad games largely because they’re faithful remakes of Diamond and Pearl, which are some of the worst designed games in the franchise, ” one user wrote, “Unova games are peak, largely because they were designed to have as little in common with Diamond and Pearl as possible. Thus BD\SP-style remakes of Unova would also be peak.”

Pokemon Black & White remakes are an inevitability. There’s no way Game Freak would miss out on the opportunity to bring back the Gen 5 games. The only question now is whether they will be handled in-house and with care, or whether they will suffer the same fate as the ill-formed Gen 4 remakes.