Video Game Pre­view: Poké­mon “Bril­liant Di­a­mond” and “Shin­ing Pearl”

The pop­u­lar Poké­mon se­ries has re­cently been an­nounced to have an in­com­ing in­stall­ment: a re­mas­ter of “Poké­mon Di­a­mond” and “Poké­mon Pearl.” 

“Poké­mon Di­a­mond” and “Poké­mon Pearl” ini­tially re­leased on the Nin­tendo DS in 2006 and re­ceived praise across the board. This was most likely be­cause it was a time when diehard Poké­mon play­ers were too young to feel nos­tal­gia, let alone al­low it to cloud their vi­sion gravely enough to cause them to in­sult any new game for not be­ing ex­actly like the ones they played as kids. Mak­ing fun of the adult fans of a kid’s game aside, “Di­a­mond” and “Pearl” have been pa­tiently await­ing their turn on Nin­ten­do’s re­make list for a long while now, and the at­ten­tive Poké­mon fans—which is to say all of them, un­for­tu­nately – no­ticed that, based on the pat­tern of re­mas­ters, they were next in line.  

As a late dis­claimer, when I am mak­ing fun of Poké­mon fans, I am specif­i­cally re­fer­ring to the peo­ple whose per­son­al­i­ties do not ex­ist out­side of this se­ries, not peo­ple who en­joy the fran­chise. I’m putting this in here be­cause I am go­ing to take enough shots at them that I’d run any mil­i­tary base dry of mu­ni­tions. 

As is the case for most re­mas­ters, the core game­play me­chan­ics do not ap­pear to have been al­tered too much. Though it is too early to tell ex­actly to what ex­tent the game has been changed, I feel com­fort­able in as­sert­ing that much. Oth­er­wise, there would not be much rea­son to la­bel these games as “re­mas­ters.” While on the sub­ject, the new ti­tles are “Bril­liant Di­a­mond” and “Shin­ing Pearl,” and I’ll be us­ing those names for the re­mas­ters and “Di­a­mond” and “Pearl” for the clas­sics. 

Poké­mon “Di­a­mond” and “Pearl” are the games based in the Sin­noh re­gion of Poké­mon. For any­one that does not have all the Poké­mon’s Pokédex num­bers and af­fil­i­ated re­gions com­mit­ted to mem­ory, the Sin­noh re­gion is the one with the silly green grass tur­tle, the or­ange fire mon­key and the cute blue pen­guin. Al­ter­na­tively, for any­one watch­ing, it was the sea­son of the show that lasted from the mid­dle of 2007 to the be­gin­ning of 2011. The bat­tling, catch­ing and train­ing of Poké­mon in this in­stall­ment are all very stan­dard, as this was one of the last Poké­mon games to re­lease with­out a gen­er­a­tion-defin­ing gim­mick, like “Mega-evo­lu­tions,” “Z-moves” and “Dy­na­max­ing.” 

You all know the drill for re­mas­ters: new graph­ics, maybe a few songs, qual­ity-of-life changes, the works. “Bril­liant Di­a­mond” and “Shin­ing Pearl,” so far, seem to be aim­ing for nos­tal­gia grabs and putting a beloved Poké­mon game on the Switch. Thus far, we have only had “Poké­mon: Let’s Go” and “Poké­mon Sword and Shield,” nei­ther of which would be de­scribed as, well, much of any­thing ex­cept “games that fea­ture Poké­mon.” I re­al­ize it is taste­less, jaded and pre­ma­ture to be mak­ing qual­ity as­sess­ments this early in the game, con­sid­er­ing “the game” has not even re­leased yet, but all those words be­long on my tomb­stone, so it does not re­ally bother me. I want the game to do well, but Nin­tendo has re­cently had a hard time mak­ing Poké­mon worth the triple-A price they slap on the game upon re­lease. 

“Di­a­mond” and “Pearl” were at that sweet spot in the Poké­mon se­ries when mak­ing the same thing but giv­ing it a new paintjob was still a-okay, a sweet spot that Ap­ple copied a year later and has man­aged to make last for over a decade. Fans of the se­ries did not bother com­plain­ing be­cause they were too busy us­ing their col­or­ful fan­tasy an­i­mal to beat seven shades of sun­shine out of their friends’ col­or­ful fan­tasy an­i­mals.  

The rea­son I men­tion com­plaints so of­ten is be­cause, sur­prise-sur­prise, Nin­tendo fans are chil­dren af­ter all: grown adults spend­ing years de­mand­ing some­thing from their very busy bene­fac­tors only to kick, scream and be un­grate­ful upon re­ceiv­ing what they asked for, due to their im­pos­si­bly high and non­sen­si­cal stan­dards. Most of the peo­ple I have seen through my brows­ing are mak­ing fun of the art style (which, to be fair, is not Nin­ten­do’s best) and “Dexit” ex­trem­ists. For those not in the know be­cause they rea­son­ably do not want to in­volve them­selves with the toxic Poké­mon fan­base, “Dexit” is a port­man­teau of “Pokédex Exit” in the style of Brexit. This is a crude but mar­ketable term to de­scribe how Game­F­reak, the com­pany be­hind Poké­mon, has, over time, cut swathes of Poké­mon out of later games for rea­sons that are so in­ad­e­quate that it would be more rea­son­able to say there are not any than to list them. These seem like nit­picks, right? Wel­come to the diehard Poké­mon fan­dom. 

I feel that, as funny as it is to make fun of the Nin­ten­drones that are only in­ter­ested in trash­ing every­thing that they have not played and loved, there are droves and droves of fans who are un­be­liev­ably ex­cited to see these re­makes. Fa­nart, rem­i­nisc­ing about the old games, pos­i­tive com­ments and tweets on Nin­tendo pages and, of course, a plethora of memes abound in prepa­ra­tion of “Shin­ing Pearl” and “Bril­liant Di­a­mond,” re­leas­ing some­time later this year. Even with­out an ex­act date, peo­ple are cer­tainly gal­va­niz­ing them­selves and those around them in an­tic­i­pa­tion for this re­mas­ter of a stone-cold clas­sic en­try in the Poké­mon se­ries.