![]() ![]() 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. Watch on YouTube Here's an overview trailer of the key new additions in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. And then finally, most generously and most dramatically, with the arrival of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl it's also now been locked to "on" for the entirety of generation eight. Over the years, as public tastes have changed - and main series developer Game Freak's with them - it's become kinder, moving from sharing experience with just a single other Pokémon to with your whole party, then experience itself changed from being earned just via battles to all successful catches of wild Pokémon, too. Availability: Out now on Nintendo Switch.Publisher: Pokémon Company International, Nintendo.Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl review ![]() ![]() Share is the single most influential tool you have for manipulating the difficulty of the game, helping your whole team level up faster with it on, or slower with it off. It's useful for a few things, but the big one is your experience of the game itself: the Exp. Share for short) is a simple tool, present in every main series Pokémon game since 1999's Pokémon Gold and Silver, that shares the experience one Pokémon gains from defeating others in battle with the others in your party. The remakes file them down to something still enjoyable, but textureless. The original Pokémon Diamond and Pearl were strange, uneven games. ![]()
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