After having time to digest this game a bit, I think I've come to the overall conclusion that this is a bad remake of a good, but very flawed game. The game is good for largely the same reasons as the original was good (though the Grand Underground and Ramanas Park have some good ideas, even if the execution is not always great), but it's also bad for largely the same reasons the original was bad, plus several new ones as a result of the way it was remade.
BDSP bills itself as a very faithful remake, but many of the decisions on when to be faithful and when not to be are very weird, and often lead to the game being worse than it really needs to be. Platinum is very thoroughly ignored, including many of the fixes it made to Diamond and Pearl. Even most of the Platinum content that did make it in is in a pretty limited capacity. Aesthetically, the game doesn't do a great job at capturing the look of the originals, and some of the choices made are just kind of bad, like the chibi overworld models and the weirdly excessive depth of field at times. The return of consumable TMs continues to be one of the worst changes Gen 8 has made to the formula. Several changes to catching mechanics were haphazardly brought over which make catching legendaries a lot harder than it originally was. The difficulty curve was not well balanced for forced EXP Share, and is only saved at the end by the Elite 4 level spike being somewhat extreme originally. The status screen in battle is just inexplicably missing. I could keep going, but I think I've made my point.
The game also is just very buggy and not well polished, which hopefully patches will fix to some degree. In particular, the controls are just really bad across the board, to the point where it really gave me a new appreciation for how Game Freak generally does a pretty good job making sure the controls are functional and responsive. Some other (dis)honorable mentions include Pokémon getting inserted into boxes in the wrong spot, and the textboxes frequently managing to get on the wrong layer during Pokéradar chaining.
To try and be constructive, here's what I'd do differently to make Black and White remakes better:
- First and foremost, ILCA (or whatever dev ends up working on them) needs to actually be given sufficient time and resources to get the job done. I don't think it's a controversial statement that they clearly didn't get that with BDSP.
- Either stick to purely grid based movement or copy exactly how movement works in ORAS.
- Consumable TMs need to go
- Just generally don't arbitrarily roll back QoL changes that weren't in the original
- It's really important that Reshiram and Zekrom get their original catch rates and not the lowered ORAS ones, since you're forced to catch them.
- The overworld graphics should go for something closer to an HD-2D style, with 2D sprites in 3D environments.
- There's quite a lot of Gen 5 that existed on the PGL which really needs to get incorporated into the games themselves this time.
- The sequels shouldn't get left out. Combining them wouldn't work, but having them as a separate mode, DLC, or separate games would work
- Actually fix the dumb unlock mechanics in B2W2
- Touch support needs to come back in full force, and not just in remakes
- Stop arbitrarily locking out Sylveon
- If they're going to keep forcing EXP share on us, then they need to start actually balancing games around it