To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Pokémon’s original Japanese release, The Pokémon Company has revealed the next games in the main Pokémon series. The beloved Pokémon Diamond and Pearl are being remade for Nintendo Switch with Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl releasing in Late 2021.
The game is made by ILCA Inc. who made Pokémon Home, with development led by ILCA’s Yuichi Ueda and Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda. However, the main team at Game Freak instead hard at work on Pokémon Legend Arceus, a game set several ages before the events of these two games.
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl have obviously been built from the ground up for the Nintendo Switch, using a 3D engine that might have a fair bit in common with that used for the Let’s Go spin-off titles. Don’t worry though, the gameplay here is very true to the originals.
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are in 3D, but remain faithful to the original games.
As in the original game, Trainers will choose from Turtwig, Chimchar, or Piplup as their starter Pokémon before setting off on a long adventure trhought he Sinnoh region, sure to encounter the Legendary Pokémon Dialga along the way.
Compared to the fully 3D adventures of Pokémon Sword & Shield and the upcoming Legend Arceus, however, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl will instead keep the top-down view of the world that the series was known for over its first two decades. Everything’s still rendered in 3D, but characters are little chibi-style characters. It’s only when you get into battle that you see the more realistic proportions of human character (but still super anime) and the 3D Pokémon models.
Battle sequences will now look closer to Pokémon Let’s Go, or Pokémon Sword & Shield.
The emphasis has been on faithfully reproducing those games for Nintendo Switch. The scale of the town and routes has been preserved, so that fans of the original games will instantly know where they are. However, the games are still updated with quality of life improvements that are intended to be easy to understand and player-friendly.
