While the long-awaited announcement of Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl was foreshadowed for many months, no long-time Pokemon fan was quite ready for what The Pokemon Company revealed to the world.  For some fans, this faithful adaptation was everything they could have wanted, while other fans remain skeptical that it will deliver a good game.

One of the biggest points of controversy surrounding the Sinnoh remakes, aside from the art style, is the claim that they are being made to be as faithful to the original Diamond & Pearl as possible, a claim that has many fans of the Sinnoh games worried as the follow-up title, Platinum, did a lot to fix some of the main issues people have with the original generation four games. Here are some of those changes that are, hopefully, coming to the remakes.

10 Seals On Trainer Battle Pokeballs

One of the coolest additions to the Pokemon series in Gen IV was the Pokeball seals that allowed the player to customize just how their team’s Pokeballs would look when they were sent into battle. While this feature is just one of many that Pokemon has since abandoned, it’s one that many fans are eager to see come back with Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl.

One more addition that Platinum added, which went a long way to making trainer battles more interesting, was the fact that NPC trainers would also have seals from time to time, making them feel like more than just EXP fodder for the player.

9 Updated Team Galactic Story

While Team Galactic has become one of the more beloved evil teams in Pokemon, this wasn’t always the case and is largely due to the additions to the story and characters introduced in Platinum.

Aside from expanding on character motivations, the heads of Team Galactic actually have a personality and don’t feel like a slightly stronger Grunt who only has the position because their Stunky evolved before everyone else’s.

8 The Gym Leader Order

Like in Black 2 & White 2, Platinum decided to change things up a bit for players who were returning from Diamond & Pearl and altered the order that players face off against the gym leaders. In Diamond & Pearl, the third gym leader was Maylene, while in Platinum, the player has to defeat Fantina before they reach Maylene.

Not only did this make the game more interesting for players who already completed Diamond & Pearl, but it was also a substantial difficulty increase that many players were looking for, particularly since Pokemon games have become notorious for being too easy in recent years.

7 Updated Gym Leader Teams

As well as the gym leader order being altered, Platinum also changed the gym leader and Elite Four teams to better represent their type specialty. This mostly affected the final two gym leaders, Candice, who had a Medicham despite being an Ice-type gym leader, and Volkner, who had an Ambipom and Octillery despite being an Electric-type gym leader.

While this was a neat addition and allowed both gym leaders to have an out for the rest of their team’s weaknesses, they were a little odd to see, particularly for the final two challenges.

6 Looker

The updates to Team Galactic not only added several new team members, team updates, and story beats but also added the international detective sent to investigate their crimes, Looker.

Since his first appearance in Platinum, Looker has returned to the series multiple times, sometimes in the main story and others in the post-game, but he is always a welcome sight and should be added to Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, despite having not appeared in the original games.

5 Updated Elite Four Arenas

Even though the graphics for the Gen IV games were a step up from the Hoenn games, there were still some areas that left a lot to be desired in terms of visuals. Most notably, the Elite Four arenas were bland and uninteresting copy-pastes of one another.

In Platinum, this was rectified so that each Elite Four member had their own unique battle arena that reflected both their type specialty and personalities much better than Diamond & Pearl ever did.

4 The Survival Area Rival Battle

Before the updates that were added in Platinum, the strongest trainer that players could battle was the champion, Cynthia, who is easily one of the toughest battles in the entire series. This changed, however, with the addition of more rival battles in the Survival Area of Sinnoh that increase their team’s levels substantially.

At their highest, the player’s rival’s team is between level 79 and 85, making even their weakest Pokemon more powerful than Cynthia’s Garchomp and giving the player something greater to strive towards once they have defeated the Elite Four.

3 The Distortion World

Of all the crazy new additions that came with Platinum, the Distortion World, home to the cover Legendary, Giratina, was one of the best.

Aside from expanding on the lore of the three cover legendary Pokemon, this segment also allowed for the story of Team Galactic to expand even further and gave Cyrus’ actions some weight that wasn’t present in the original version of this story.

2 The Battle Frontier

One of the biggest missed opportunities for Pokemon Sword & Shield was the complete lack of a Battle Frontier. A feature that just about every Pokemon fan wants to see since its debut in Pokemon Emerald, the Battle Frontier goes a long way to giving the player something to do once they have beaten the game, as many Pokemon games don’t have much in the way of post-game content.

While the Battle Frontier didn’t appear in Diamond & Pearl, it did make an appearance in Platinum and is a feature that definitely should be added to Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl.

1 The Expanded Sinnoh Dex

While Diamond & Pearl were great games, they were massively flawed when it came to type representation, which is most exemplified by the fact that the only Fire-type available to the player before any post-game content, with the exception of Chimchar, was Ponyta.

This was fixed somewhat in Platinum, with several new additions to the Regional ‘Dex that gave players more options for their team, but with the promise that the remakes would be faithful to the original games, this may be one aspect introduced in Platinum that the developers should add to Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl.