It would've been great for TMs to be reusable like in some more modern games, but alas, no - although you do get some multiples of them throughout. Legends: Arceus gets seemingly the most advanced mechanics yet, bringing Pokémon into a pseudo open world, while BDSP act as something of a half-step, leaving the likes of freely moving cameras, higher-detail models, moves, and animations, Mega Evolution, and the contemporary equivalent of Dynamaxing out, in the hope of still attracting new players to the Sinnoh region and tickling the nostalgia button for those who wanted to revisit.
The only thing predictable about the Pokémon Company is its unpredictability, however, so instead of the straight current-gen-visuals-and-mechanics-applied-to-classic-games treatment, we're getting two different kinds of game altogether. The tricky spot comes from the fact Pokémon fans have been clamouring for "Sinnoh remakes" for months, if not years, in the hope that they would get the same contemporary reimagining that we've had with the prior three generations of FireRed and LeafGreen, HeartGold and SoulSilver, and Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. It's also releasing just a couple of months before Pokémon Legends: Arceus, which is being developed by Game Freak, and is set in the same Sinnoh region as generation four's Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, but is a prequel rather than a remake.
For the first time, the Pokémon Company is publishing a main series game that is not developed by Game Freak, with BDSP instead handled by ILCA (short for I Love Computer Art), the studio behind Pokémon storage app Pokémon Home that's also supported development of games like Yakuza 0, Dragon Quest 11, and NieR: Automata. comes at a good rate, with a nice challenge to battles - including these very early-game Abras setting themselves up with clever plays, believe it or not! Sadly, despite some welcome changes to movesets for opponents, the balance falls off once you get going.īrilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl occupy a tricky spot in the series. More simply: they've just remastered the wrong stuff. Share - result in something more bluntly palatable but far less natural, smoothed in all the wrong places like an oil-based portrait yassified through FaceApp.
They're coarse and awkward but, crucially, at least characterful as a result, and Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl's catch-all attempts to smooth that over - like the parachuting in of the always-on Exp. The original games were strange, uneven things, with some curious difficulty spikes in battles, a famously bizarre type imbalance (a fairly Steel-heavy game with just the one Fire-type evolution line to counter it, the less-than-useful Ponyta and Rapidash, if you didn't choose the Fire-type starter), some weirdly easy-to-miss HMs, and a Chibi-and-pixel-art mix of styles. What really lingers, though, is how indicative this is of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl as a whole. To counter that I can halve the amount of Pokémon I regularly carry in my team, or try to dodge as many trainers as possible, but that's hardly ideal - and could easily be avoided by simply including the option to turn the Exp. It means that while only ever battling trainers, catching previously un-caught wild Pokémon, running from all other encounters and occasionally swapping the odd 'mon out of my party, I was still consistently eight to ten levels above my opponents throughout. They're remakes - very close remakes, it turns out - of 2006's Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, which are very different games to the Sword and Shield of 2019, and so the result is predictably messy, the eighth-gen's easy, weightless momentum plonked into the fourth-gen's world, its trainers, encounters, and opponents all largely identical to the originals in level and stats and strength.
But Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, naturally, aren't built from the ground up to accommodate an always-on Exp. In the other generation eight games, Pokémon Sword and Shield, this isn't too big a deal - the games themselves were, at least in theory, built around things working that way, and so whatever you may think of their pacing, the opposition trainers, their Pokémon and their levels were placed in that game with the mechanic in mind, the game created with some intention towards it as a whole.