DIAMOND AND PEARL REMAKE SERIES

You’re moving like molasses - and the acquisition of the shoes isn’t tied to any major story event where moving it would cause a problem. This happens about ten minutes into the game, but that first short stint is painfully slow. In Diamond and Pearl, the player character starts off painfully slow, but then is eventually gifted the Running Shoes. Let me give you a very simple early-game example. I haven’t yet reached the post-game where there are more additions, which is why these are impressions rather than a scored review, but it’s sort of astonishing how faithful it is. That fact makes this remake work, though it is extremely workmanlike, as I said.

DIAMOND AND PEARL REMAKE SERIES

Pokemon is more mechanically rich now, but BDSP offers a glimpse at the series when it was just a little more innocent and simple. It’s a chance to take a victory lap of that basic, arguably timeless structure of a young kid heading out into an RPG world to travel from town to town to tackle their gyms with few other distractions - apart from a criminal team, anyway.

The fact this is a more traditional Pokemon game is actually great at this time - it offers a lovely counterpoint to the direction the rest of the series is travelling in, especially with the most different Pokemon ever on the horizon in the new year. The next generation is where the series began to mix things up more and more, which years later would culminate in the series-shaking Sword and Shield and next year’s Legends: Arceus. If the first three generations loosely form a trilogy, at least in design terms, this fourth generation acts as something of a coda. I’d say that Diamond and Pearl are arguably the last of the early, most staunchly traditional Pokemon games. Look beyond the visuals and what you’ll find is… very much a 2006 Pokemon game. This might sound potentially jarring, but it isn’t - Japanese RPGs have been utilizing different art styles for battles and the overworld for a long time, and what is good enough for Final Fantasy 7 is certainly good enough for Pokemon. When you slip into battle, the game swaps art styles to a more contemporary Pokemon look that essentially resembles the anime. But I do think it fits, and it’s a wonderful representation of how the vaguely chubby, stubby sprites used back on the Nintendo DS might look if rendered relatively faithfully using modern 3D graphics. The chibi style of characters on the overworld is somewhat reminiscent of the dreamy toy-like style of the Switch remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which not everybody loved. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. It is the same game with a handsome new coat of paint.

Rather than being new versions of Diamond and Pearl that are designed to match up to the style and presentation of Pokemon Sword & Shield, it’s a more workmanlike, simplistic remake. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl break with that tradition, to an extent. So FireRed and LeafGreen shared a visual look and feature set with the GBA-era Pokemon games, while HeartGold and SoulSilver did the same for the DS era. The concept behind Pokemon remakes, as established by the first couple back in 2004, is to modernize older Pokemon titles up to the standards of the ‘current’ generation. The latest small adjustment to series traditions comes in its newest pair of remakes - which are a little different to those we’ve had in the past. Some of these changes fans have loved, some they’ve understood, and some they’ve criticized. We’ve seen the series experiment with getting rid of the traditional gym battle structure, with open-world design, and famously with jettisoning some older Pokemon from the current playable Pokedex. Over the last few years, Pokemon has taken a few interesting detours.

Diamond and pearl remake