Who are the games in the Pokémon franchise for today? We remain puzzled by the new remakes for Nintendo Switch Pokémon Brilliant Diamondand Pokémon Shining Pearl. By trying to please everyone, Nintendo manages to disappoint both nostalgic for the series and neophytes.
What is new in these remakes ? Not much. In the smallest detail, the Japanese studio ILCA reproduced the opus Diamond and Pearl, originally released on the Nintendo DS, with revamped graphics, moving from pixelated 2D to simple 3D, with the same zenithal perspective. The characters now adopt a distorted look that is meant to be adorable, but that doesn’t suit the antagonists of the story. The fights are also in 3D, but always turn-based.
Would it not have been possible to take the experience further by reconstructing these games in the style of Pokémon Sword and Shield ? ILCA, supervised by Nintendo and the original studio of the series, Game Freak, is not breaking new ground. It is before a missed opportunity that we find ourselves; an abysmal and sleepy videogame void.
Already in 2006, the concept behind the series was running out of steam. On paper, the idea of forming a team of little monsters and training them to one day “become the best trainer” is appealing. But in practice, once our team is well established, each fight becomes disarmingly easy. What is the point of “catching them all” if you manage to “win all the challenges” with the same six pocket monsters?
Already easy and linear, Diamond and Pearl are even more diluted with the addition of accessibility functions of all kinds. A flag indicates the next place to go, killing any sense of exploration. Cheat sheets tell us which attacks are effective against a particular Pokémon. Our entire team now gains experience with every fight.
Does the game become more accessible? We loaned the controller to a young Pokémon lover who had never picked up an “old-fashioned” title in the series. Result of the experiment? The most total confusion. Even lightened, Brilliant Diamond and Shining pearl fail to hook the neophyte. And they disappoint those who expected a real challenge.
It makes you wonder if the Japanese giant faced such a great void between the duo Sword and Shield (2019) and the next Arceus: Legends, scheduled for January 2022, that he quickly entrusted the highest-paying media franchise on the planet to a little-known studio, until now confined to support functions.
At Nintendo, we obviously expect to hook only the fanatics of the series. We would stick another label than “Pokémon” to these role-playing games and we would quickly forget them. To avoid.