Pokemon Brilliant Diamond remakes Pokemon Diamond on the Nintendo DS. I hadn’t played Diamond, so I went into Brilliant Diamond blind. This is my preferred way of playing video games. I was a gamer before the Internet was public. I grew up making my own maps for The Legend of Zelda and other games. So I do my best to avoid any information about games before I play them; it’s more fun not knowing what to expect.
So I approached Brilliant Diamond with my usual Pokemon strategy: settle on a balanced team early and level just them. I don’t have time to fill out a complete Pokedex or to grind levels. Thankfully, Brilliant Diamond offers an experience sharing feature: everyone in your party gets some bit of experience from fights. While old-school Pokemon fans seem to not like this feature, as someone who didn’t like how Red and Blue leveled, I welcomed this sharing feature. It saved me a lot of time. I beat the Elite Four and the Champion in about 21 hours of play time. Now that I’m older, I don’t have the time to 100% games, so I deemed the game finished when I beat the Champ. I was surprised by the difficulty of the Champion, especially as an old-school JRPG player. But after grinding some levels and buying more items, I cheesed a win.
Brilliant Diamond follows the usual Pokemon structure. You move from town to town beating gym leaders for their badges in order to get to the Pokemon League to challenge the best of the best. There’s also the Pokemon Super Show beauty pageant, but I didn’t bother with it. There’s a Pokemon friendship system where your critters will resist status debuffs and fatal hits or they will strike more critical hits. The system really makes your Pokemon overpowered at times. My Jirachi, which you unlock by having a Pokemon Sword or Shield save file on your Switch, would crit every other hit. While I enjoy RPGs with dark, twisting stories, playing a straight-forward Pokemon game is always a good time. It’s easy outside the final battles, which requires just a bit of grinding and item buying along with slightly tweaking your team. Easy games can be a good time.
Not too much else can be said if you’ve played any Pokemon game, you won’t find anything drastically different here. Brilliant Diamond features double Pokemon battles which amused me several times. Your frenemy joins you in several battles against Team Galactic, the villain gang who wants to remake the world to match their vision of peace. Well, your Pokemon can learn skills that attack everything on the battlefield, including allies. My Pokemon were always far more powerful than my ally’s, so I would use battlefield-wide skills to defeat all the Pokemon on the field, including my ally. It amused me a little too much, perhaps.
Turn-based RPGs have become something of a rarity in favor of action RPGs. Action RPGs are fine, but I much prefer menu-based games. They are a lot less twitchy and more tactical. But we are in the age of first-person shooters. People expect twitch play. So, I’m pleased Pokemon has stayed with its menu-based formula, even if it is becoming a little stale over the decades. If my strategy honed all the way back in Red and Blue still works with only few tweaks, it might be time for Pokemon to change the formula a bit. Of course, the game is aimed at kids and not old-school RPG players like me. What more can be said about Pokemon? It has been a constant in people’s lives for many decades. It’s cross generational. Many parents and their kids enjoy the games. The anime has refreshed itself with every game release cycle. As I’ve written before, the XY/XYZ series had surprisingly high quality animation and an interesting character story within the usual Pokemon cartoon framework.
Pokemon’s continued focus on friendship and civility amid disagreements, within the game and within the anime, provides good lessons. It’s amusing when a Team Galactic member, who is bent on world-domination. backs down peacefully just because you win the Pokemon fight. Many conflicts end with some common ground, and a mutual understanding of perspectives. Perhaps we should make Internet disagreements into Pokemon fights with the same mutual understanding at the outcome. It would lend closure to the endless online shouting matches, at least!
I recommend giving Brilliant Diamond a play, especially if you haven’t played the original. It’s a fun time, even if you don’t want to fill out the Pokedex and do the endgame content. It’s a relaxing, innocent game. I just wished I could’ve found Eevee. It felt odd not to have at least one Eevee in my team, but I also didn’t look hard for one.
