Last week's special Pokémon announcement has come and gone, and with it, many people's hopes of a Sinnoh remake, at least for now. While a lot of people were disappointed by Pokémon Unite's announcement, it's worth asking ourselves: if the Pokemon Company did announce a Sinnoh remake, how would we want it to look? What wo𒁏uld be considered "good"?
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl released in September of 2006, and Platinum followed two years after. It has been nearly a decade and a half since the Sinnoh games were first released. To put it into perspective, there was also a fourteen year difference between the release of Fire Red and Leaf Green (2004) and the Let's Go games, both of which centered around the Kanto region. Knowing this, it's unlikely that gen four will be left behind forever: eventually, remakes will come. When they do, we should to be reaꦿdy to come to terms with our expectations of them.
Mainline Game Style Changes
We can start with the obvious mechanical changes from generation to generation. As of Gen 7, the Pokémon franchise has more or less done away with HMs entirely - meaning one of the Sinnoh region's most treasured commodities, the HM Bibarel, will be put out of business in favor of ride Pokémon as featured in Sun and Moon. Or a b🌳ike, although the Sinnoh region's heavy snow regions make the latter seem a bit of a strange choice.
While doing away with things the series has moved on from is c🥂onsidered a given, what about including things that have become series standard? Every new main game since gen 6 has included a Pokémon Amie-type feature, including the Hoenn remakes. To integrate them into a single-screen console game though, it's likely they would have to establish something similar to gen 8's camping system to access that function in a Sinnoh remake. The lack of split screen also means that the PokéTech watch will probably have to be changed or removed.
Moving the gen to Switch also comes with certain extra responsibilities - rendering routes that were meant to be seen from a top-down perspective into 3D can be🍰 challenging enough, but a lot of the routes in Sinnoh also feature severe weather that could lead to performance issues now that graphics are more demanding than they'd been on the DS. Heavy snow, thick fog, and the unrelenting rain in some areas of the game could prove hard to swallow without a few tweaks or lag checks.
Finally, with the inclusion of overworld spawns in the mainline Sword and Shield games, it's possible that Game Freak could decide to make this a series staple, as it's been a feature of both Switch Pokémon games to date. The Let's Go games relied on overworld spawns for their mechanics, though, so it's still possible they opt not to in🎃clude them in a proper remake...just increasingly unlikely.
The Pokédex
Past remakes such as Heart Gold and Soul Silver extended their pokédexes to include Pokémon that released in the generations after the original. Will a Sinnoh remake include scatterꦏed Pokémon from generation 5 and onward? Would fans even want it to? Game Freak has made their stance that the ever-expanding dex is unsustainable fairly clear. Because of that, it's pretty unlikely that they'll be including Pokémon from gen 5 and up.
While a handful of Pokémon added to evolutionary lines might be kept (looking at you, Sylveon), it doesn't seem likely that any more than the ~500 Pokemon in the National Pokedex of the original games will make it - if they even opt to include the entirety of the National Pokédex to start with. Sword and Shield capped out at 400 Pokémon before the DLC added more, so 500 seems to be about the number we could expect them to include i🍎n the new age of console Pokémon games.
Post-Game And Online Content
Diamond and Pearl's Underground co-op area was a fun, if at times confusing to navigate, feature of the original game. With new and improved console functionality, it could be a bubble trap-filled, flag-capturing good time to have with other Pokémon players. It could also be a lag-riddled mess. It's no secret that turning online mode on in the Wild Areas of Galar can lead to some issues. If that can't be fixed, the Underground may not be as fun as it 🀅once was, even with a graphical overhaul and the stronger hardware of the Switch trying to hold it up.
As for the post-game, it might actually be an opportunity for Game Freak to take a good aspect of ORAS: the Delta episode. Since remakes don't generally involve the third release of a game (there was no Crystal remake, for example), the Hoenn remakes decided to include a substory with the third legendary as a post-game episode with continued story content. Introducing something like this into the post-game of Diamond and Pearl remakes would provide extra content after the game, make it possible (or at least easier) to get the third box legendary, and possibly even help us to tie up some loose ends with Team Galactic that were left after the original Platinum's story ended.
Giritina's dimension-hopping might even include the Distortion World again, allowing players to experience the trippy alternate dimension in entirely new ways. Whether it's used to open up mechanics like the Ultra Wormholes or just as a post-game location that's cool to explore, it's something𒆙 that could be fantastic if it makes the cut.