Remakes of main-series Pokemon games are almost as common as new Pokemon games, and we’re lucky enough to get two separate generations reimagined on the Nintendo Switch. We saw the very first Pokemon games given a unique and simplified spin in 2018 with Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu and Let’s Go, Eevee, and now it’s the fourth generation’s turn. Pokemon Diamond and Pearl have been remade into Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, with new graphics and refined mechanics. It’s a fun Pokemon romp with plenty to do, though it doesn’t add much in terms of content, and several online features aren’t available at launch. Along with a visual style that seems a step back from the latest generation games, Pokemon Sword and Shield, the full $59.99 price of each version might sting a bit. It’s still a solid remake, and if you’re a fan of Pokemon you’ll still get plenty out of it. We tested Pokemon Brilliant Diamond; as is standard with Pokemon versions, Shining Pearl is nearly identical, but with a handful of different Pokemon available to catch. Neither game has the additional story content or extra features that Pokemon Platinum added to the original Diamond and Pearl, though you can still catch Platinum’s legendary Pokemon Giratina in the post-game.
Return to Sinnoh
As remakes of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl follow the plot of the fourth-generation Pokemon games directly, and the general structure of all main-series Pokemon game. You’re a young Pokemon trainer in the Sinnoh region (loosely based on Hokkaido), who gets their first Pokemon and goes on an adventure to defeat the Pokemon League’s Elite Four and become the region’s Champion. To do that, you travel around the region, beating eight gym leaders before facing the current Champion, all while battling your hometown rival and friend on the way. In the process, you stumble upon the evil Team Galactic’s plot to use the region’s legendary Pokemon to their own ends. It’s the classic Pokemon formula.
The mechanical Pokemon staples are also all here, and are largely untouched from the original Diamond and Pearl. You catch wild Pokemon by weakening them in battles and using Pokeballs to snatch them up. You collect as many as you can (or want), keeping a team of up to six at a time, each with up to four moves to use in battles. Besides wild Pokemon, you’ll regularly fight other trainers and their own teams, both inside and out of Pokemon gyms.
The rock-paper-scissors dynamic of different Pokemon elements is just as important as your Pokemon’s RPG-like level and stats, and Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl add the Fairy element type (originally added in the sixth-generation games, Pokemon X and Y) to better balance how Pokemon fare against each other.
Outside of battle, you’re gently guided around the region in a loose path due to various obstacles. Most of these obstacles can be overcome by using Hidden Moves, which are unlocked when you beat Gym Leaders. As a nice quality-of-life improvement, you no longer need to use Hidden Machines to train your Pokemon to use these moves, which often resulted in relegating a Pokemon or two in your team purely to get around the map. Instead, once the move is available, activating it attracts a nearby wild Pokemon to do the job for you.
Fun as Well as Fighting
Besides running around and fighting Pokemon to become the Champion, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl have several optional activities you can enjoy. You can have your Pokemon participate in talent contests that evaluate them based on a separate set of non-combat stats like coolness and cuteness. Different moves hype up the crowd, and a few timing-based and strategy-based minigames add some direct interaction.
You can also explore the Grand Underground by using an item to dig into an extensive tunnel network anywhere in the region. Down here you can uncover items in walls through a quick Minesweeper-like puzzle game, and catch rare Pokemon in caverns. You can even dig out your own secret base and decorate it. You can’t use the Grand Underground to travel, though; no matter where you explore, when you leave it you’ll pop back up where you entered.
Playing through the full story of Shining Diamond or Brilliant Pearl will generally take between 14 to 20 hours, not counting getting caught up in distractions like Pokemon contests and the Grand Underground. And, as is standard for Pokemon games at this point, there’s generous post-game content that opens up after you beat the Pokemon League. The Battle Zone from the original Diamond and Pearl returns, offering new Pokemon to catch and new trainers to fight, which you might not have seen exploring the rest of the region. The Battle Zone also features the Battle Tower, which offers gauntlets of trainer battles to attempt. You can also re-challenge Gym Leaders and the Elite Four, who use more powerful Pokemon than they do when you first fight them. The new Ramanas Park area lets you battle and catch several of the legendary Pokemon from other games. And, as always, there are other players to pit your Pokemon against.
Incomplete Online
Shining Diamond and Brilliant Pearl have all of the standard multiplayer options for a modern Pokemon game, with a caveat at launch. You can connect with other players’ Switches to trade and battle in local or online Union Rooms, which serve as a waiting room for player interactions. However, those rooms are limited to just two people at launch, with plans to allow multiple players in the future. So you won’t be able to have any big Pokemon parties through the game just yet. There’s also the Colosseum, a room found in Pokemon centers next to the online Union Room entrance, but it is not currently available and will be enabled in a future update. It isn’t clear what this will offer.
Trades are limited to direct interactions, but that might change in the future with another possible update. There’s a building in Jubilife City called the Global Wonder Station, or GWS. It also is not yet enabled, but presumably it will support Wonder Trades or Surprise Trades, where you can put up Pokemon for random trades with random players all over the world. There’s no official word on this, though.
Support for Pokemon Home, the cloud service that lets you move Pokemon between different generations of games on the Switch, is also not available at launch. You probably won’t be able to transfer your favorite Pokemon from Sword/Shield until next year. As for Nintendo’s bigger online service, Nintendo Switch Online, cloud saves are once again disabled as they are for all Pokemon games.
Big Head Mode
Visually, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl take a step back from the other Pokemon games on the Switch. Pokemon battles look as good as they usually do, featuring attractive, sharp, and visually simple designs, with minimal animations fighting each other with different glowing effects. It isn’t an eye-catching display (and you don’t get the wild spectacle of Gigantamax Pokemon like in Sword and Shield), but it works well enough, and the simplicity means the game can feature hundreds of different Pokemon.
The games really trip up outside of battle, however, by trying to mimic the aesthetics of the original Diamond and Pearl too closely. Characters on the overworld have Animal Crossing proportions that make them look like bobbleheads or slightly-better-looking Funko Pops. It’s especially bad during cutscenes where the camera zooms in on these bobbleheaded, smoothly textured faces. Big-head sprite designs worked well on the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance, where memory, color, and available pixels were all at a premium. But it’s strange-looking on the Switch’s 720p screen (or on a TV at 1080p), especially when the first-generation remakes on the system, Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee, used much more natural proportions. At least characters look closer to their Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee counterparts when Pokemon battles start, though they’re still simpler in design than trainers in Sword/Shield.
Pokemon Still Shines
Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are fun, content-packed remakes of the fourth-generation Pokemon games, combining loads of things to do (that still hold up 15 years and four Pokemon generations later) with a few pleasant quality-of-life improvements. The graphics are a bit disappointing after Pokemon Sword and Shield proved that the Switch can make these games look much more detailed than earlier games, and the bobblehead character design is jarring. It’s also a shame that some online features simply aren’t ready at launch. Even with those qualms, this is an engaging game that, while not doing much new, will still satisfy fans with at least a dozen or two hours of catching and battling Pokemon. At least, it should hold you over until Pokemon Legends: Arceus comes out next year, with its apparently wildly different structure and likely much better visuals.
