

There's rarely a reason to revisit locations on Sinnoh's map after you've been there once (other than to pick berries you've planted), and you need to get pretty deep into the main story before you'll be challenged by most of the trainers or Gym Leaders you fight. And the locations you visit and the characters you meet (including this iteration's Team Rocket-esque gang of petty criminals, Team Galactic) are among the series' least-memorable. The level grinding, rigidly linear exploration, barely there story, bland dialogue, and simple city and town designs are all way too familiar at this point.

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And for younger players who enjoyed the Pokémon Let's Go games, the simpler and more linear structure of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl will be easier to follow and understand than Sword and Shield.īut for series veterans, there are parts of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl that feel threadbare, especially for a $60 console game. And as much as I miss Sword's and Shield's more ambitious graphics and design, developer ILCA has done a clever job of melding the cute chibi art style used in the overworld with the more realistically rendered Sword and Shield-like characters and 3D arenas used for battles. They're Pokémon gamesĬatching, raising, and battling Pokémon has always been the bedrock of the series, and the rock-paper-scissors-style battle system remains satisfyingly easy to learn but difficult to master. It's not that there aren't improvements-it's just that, even relative to other Pokémon remakes, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl feel inessential. The games are faithful to their source material, but that source material is a pair of games released on the original Nintendo DS in 2007, and both the originals and the remakes hew much more closely to the series' Game Boy roots. In that context, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl can't help but feel like a bit of a letdown.
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There were still some weird quirks-story cutscenes with mouth movements but no actual spoken dialogue come to mind-but it felt like the series had finally broken free of some of the conventions it had been leaning on since the earliest Game Boy entries. Part of Sword's and Shield's appeal, as we explored a bit in our review, was that they used the Switch's extra hardware power to create a truly console-sized adventure, crafting a world with an impressive sense of scale and the series' first free-roaming overworld areas. The two titles are, collectively, the fifth best-selling game in the Switch's history, trailing only Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the Switch iterations of Smash Bros. and Animal Crossing, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. They're the best-selling Pokémon games since Pokémon Gold and Silver were released at the height of late-'90s/early-'00s Pokémania over two decades ago. Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield may have disappointed some of the series' most devoted fans with their truncated Pokédexes, but that doesn't seem to have hurt them much with the game-buying public.

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Links (Pearl): Nintendo | Amazon | Best Buy Links (Diamond): Nintendo | Amazon | Best Buy
