Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl Don’t Know Whether They Want To Be Faithful Remakes Or Not
The new games are inconsistent with how faithful to the originals they want to be
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Category : Pokemon
Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl were always purported to be faithful remakes of the Gen 4 games, and for the most part they live up to that faithful recreation. Our reviewer Cian Maher felt that their ignorance of improvements added in Platinum was the remakes’ biggest downfall, but there are more changes that I struggle to understand.
Take TMs as a prime example. As Cian mentioned in his review, you now get a handful of single-use TMs from each gym leader rather than the one in the originals. This is likely to help players who are used to the unlimited-use TMs introduced in more recent games, but results in making the remakes even easier than they already are.
A great addition is the fact that HMs are used by wild Pokemon via your Poketch. This quality of life improvement is most welcome, and probably contributes to a fraction of the number of people using Bidoof in their playthrough this time around. However, wild encounters are still a thing, and after the luxury of overworld Pokemon that you can quickly outmanoeuvre in Sword & Shield, encountering a thousand Zubats per cave is an unfortunate step backwards. We dealt with these problems in our childhood, but nowadays we have the capability to improve our cave-exploring experience, so why not take it?
You could be forgiven for thinking that this falls under the category of “faithfully” remaking Diamond & Pearl, but you’d be wrong. As well as HM improvements, the Fairy type has been added (and Cynthia’s Dragon-type squad adapted to boot), moves from Generations 5-8 included, and Nature Mints made available for those incremental stat boosts. Considering that competitive Pokemon battles will still use Sword & Shield, this latter change in particular seems unnecessary – but that doesn’t mean it’s unwelcome.
What these changes serve to highlight, however, is the additions that didn’t make the cut. Items such as the Assault Vest and Eviolite haven’t been added to the game, and neither has it been made easier to access items like the Magmarizer or Electirizer. I don’t want to have to catch 100 Elekids just to evolve my Electabuzz, it’s just ridiculous. Sword & Shield did away with the Mossy Rock to make it less of a hassle to evolve Eevee into Leafeon, so Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl could have done the same for Magmortar and co.
While I’m glad of the quality of life upgrades that we did get, I can’t help but feel shortchanged. Some go hand in hand: no Eviolite and an impossible-to-find Electirizer means Electabuzz is pretty much useless. I know everyone and their mum prefers Luxray, but Electivire is way cooler and I’m gutted I can’t use it in my playthrough without spending a few hours grinding for an item.
That’s ultimately what Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl boils down to: it plays things too safe and doesn’t include enough of the QoL-boosting features that Pokemon fans have come to expect. Why introduce some features and not others? We don’t want the game to be easier (Exp. Share is still very much a part of the game), but we don’t want to grind for important items or be inundated with wild battles every time we take a step on our adventure. If everything was identical to the original games, I could forgive it, but it’s the inconsistencies that kill us.
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