The Game Mechanics that Almost Ruined my Experience with Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl (BDSP) does a phenomenal job of evoking the same charm and character of the original Pokémon Diamond and Pearl games released fifteen years ago. As someone who played these games during their release, it was a pleasure to revisit the Sinnoh region on the Nintendo Switch with updated graphics and a breathtaking remastered soundtrack. The story, setting and features introduced in the original Diamond and Pearl games were faithfully recreated for BDSP, and the games succeed as remakes in terms of staying true to and nurturing the creative elements that made the original games so special and unique. Players intimately familiar with the original games will have a deeply nostalgic experience playing through BDSP and will have a blast uncovering how their favorite moments were adapted and reimagined.
From a gameplay perspective, I loved how BDSP caters to different types of players, particularly through some of the new and updated content that was added. Pokémon collectors will gravitate towards the Grand Underground, an overhauled version of the Underground from the original games which offers BDSP a ton of replay value. The Grand Underground features different habitats home to hundreds of unique Pokémon species to catch, along with rare Mysterious Shards that can be acquired and used to encounter 13 Legendary Pokémon from different regions. Players who are addicted to the challenge and strategy of Pokémon battling can test their skills at the Battle Tower and take on some seriously tough rematches with the game’s Gym Leaders and the Elite Four, the latter of which is completely new to BDSP.
Although Pokémon BDSP did so many things right and I can go on and on about the games’ strengths, I sadly will not be writing a review that further elaborates on these aspects. Instead, I am choosing to focus the review on some mechanics implemented in the game that ended up souring my appreciation for BDSP’s achievements and left behind a less than positive impression. These mechanics, seemingly small and harmless at first glance, ended up dampening my experience to the point where playing through the main game started to feel like a chore. I did not expect to write a review like this heading into BDSP, but I feel compelled to take this approach given how much these mechanics impacted my enjoyment of the game. By discussing these mechanics in greater detail, gamers interested in BDSP can go into the games with the right expectations and make the right tweaks to their gameplay to have a more positive experience overall.
Always-On Exp. Share — delivering gameplay fans don’t want to experience
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond was the first Pokémon game I’ve played since Pokémon Black 2 in 2012. Back then, I went through all these Pokémon games the same way — using a party of six Pokémon, and not skipping a single trainer battle leading up to the Elite Four and Champion. I imagine that many other players would approach Pokémon games in the same fashion. I assumed heading into BDSP that the game would be able to accommodate this playstyle, which has become almost second nature to me as a blueprint for playing through a Pokémon game from the very start.
I could not have been more wrong. By following the same playstyle that I have always embraced, Pokémon BDSP started to become too easy and eventually got monotonous and boring. The driving force behind this was the overhauled Exp. Share, which quickly overleveled my team and made a large portion of the game a cakewalk.
The Exp. Share is a game mechanic that has evolved considerably since my days playing Pokémon on the Nintendo DS. The Exp. Share been a part of Pokémon games since the very beginning. In the games I have played (Emerald to Black 2), the Exp. Share was a held item. The Pokémon holding the Exp. Share would earn 50% of EXP from battles, regardless of whether it participated in the battle or not. The Exp. Share was a useful item, providing a means to raise Pokémon that were underleveled and not yet strong enough to hold their own in combat.
I was not aware that the Exp. Share was changed when Pokémon moved to the Nintendo 3DS with Pokémon X and Y (which I have not played). In these games, the Exp. Share became a Key Item that provided the entire party with EXP from battles, greatly improving its effectiveness versus its predecessor. Battles in these games can produce over double the amount of total EXP points compared to before, with up to four additional Pokémon now eligible to receive EXP under the reworked Exp. Share. This new iteration of the Exp. Share has some clear benefits, as it greatly reduces the time spent level grinding a team and makes that aspect of Pokémon less tedious. However, an unintended consequence of using the Exp. Share in these games was that battles could become too easy given how rapidly the Exp. Share enables the entire party to grow. The Exp. Share could be turned off at any time if overleveling ever became a concern, and I appreciate that players were provided with the option to take on a more challenging experience by disabling the Exp. Share and growing their Pokémon normally.
For all Pokémon games released for the Switch (Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee, Sword and Shield, BDSP), the Exp. Share was transitioned to a permanent feature that could no longer be disabled. The inability to toggle the Exp. Share off has been a controversial subject in the Pokémon community, with most fan criticisms centered around the lack of player choice concerning this mechanic and the impact that the Exp. Share has on the general difficulty and challenge of these games.
I cannot speak for how the Exp. Share was implemented in Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee and Sword and Shield, but BDSP is unfortunately not well balanced around the new Exp. Share which was not present in the original Diamond and Pearl games. Battling every trainer in-game with the same six Pokémon party throughout will certainly result in the entire team becoming substantially overleveled until the Elite Four. By the time I got to the seventh Gym Leader, my entire party was around 8–10 levels higher than every trainer I fought and most battles became mindless, unsatisfying one-hit KO sweeps. Because I lacked the foresight to go out of my way early on to get around the Exp. Share (avoiding trainers, sending Pokémon to the box when I was not battling with them, etc.) to prevent my team from becoming overleveled, my BDSP experience declined multiple notches because I was no longer being challenged by the game.
The biggest downside of being overleveled is that it reduces the need to think strategically, which is precisely what makes Pokémon battling so unique and fun. Against an evenly matched opponent, it is critical that players prepare a plan of attack for each battle, exploit the opponent’s weaknesses and carefully consider the pros and cons of their upcoming moves to ensure victory. Sadly, the complex decision making that exemplifies Pokémon battling all goes out the window when your team is levels ahead of the competition. Almost any Pokémon will perform well with the right level lead, and there really is no need to strategize and plan ahead in these situations when opposing Pokémon are too weak to inflict critical damage while your Pokémon have the capability of one-shotting the opponent multiple times over.
By the time I reached the Elite Four, BDSP started to get challenging again, finally restoring what I was felt was missing and non-existent for such a large portion of my playthrough. Because the Elite Four and Champion were using Pokémon with levels close to or occasionally exceeding that of my party, there was now a real threat of losing and an actual need for me to critically think through my decisions to successfully navigate through these battles. One of the hallmarks of the older Pokémon games was taking on the toughest trainers knowing full well beating them will not be easy and finding ways to win against all odds through resourcefulness and creativity. The difficulty of some of the major battles in older Pokémon games made these battles feel so much more important, rewarding, and meaningful, and experiencing battles of that caliber in BDSP through the Elite Four and Champion made this part of the game super engaging and fun. I just wish I could have experienced the same degree of gratification and accomplishment for the major battles I faced leading up to the Elite Four, and it is a shame that most of these battles are not ones that I can look back on fondly with how one-sided they were.
Affection System — I’m NOT loving it
Imagine fighting a difficult boss in a video game. You are struggling and failing each attempt, but slowly understanding the behavior of the boss and getting a bit closer each time. Then suddenly, your character gets a random stat boost out of nowhere which makes the boss trivially easy to defeat. How would you feel if this happened to you in a video game? I bet most people would not feel satisfied at all with their victory and instead feel pretty unfulfilled defeating a tough boss in the manner I described, with overpowered RNG tipping the scales in their favor.
Although Pokémon has always had an element of RNG impacting the outcome of battles in the form of critical hits and inaccurate moves for example, BDSP takes that up a notch with a mechanic that drastically makes battles based more on luck rather than skill and strategy. The Affection System, introduced in Pokémon X and Y, returns in BDSP. In a nutshell, each Pokémon has an individual affection value which grows over time through different in-game interactions with the Pokémon. After a Pokémon’s affection reaches a certain threshold, random effects have a chance of activating to help the Pokémon in battle. These effects are super broken — for example, Pokémon with maximum affection have a doubled critical hit rate, and they can occasionally survive lethal attacks with 1HP or avoid 100 accuracy moves that normally would not miss. These effects also usually end up being the deciding factor in winning a battle when they fire off.
The Affection System and the buffs that it provides in battle have been present in previous Pokémon games, but it has never caused a major uproar in the Pokémon community because of how it was implemented. In most Pokémon games with the Affection System, raising affection to unlock these effects in battle required interaction with elements of the game (e.g. Pokémon-Amie in X and Y, and Pokémon Camp in Sword and Shield) that were entirely optional. Players had a choice on whether they wanted the Affection System to influence their battles or not in these Pokémon games. This is unfortunately not the case in BDSP, as Affection is maximized through normal in-game activity (e.g. walking and battling) not tied to an optional feature. As such, the broken battle effects that come with the system therefore cannot be avoided by players. (Affection can technically be lowered to stop battle effects from triggering, but it is so cumbersome and tedious to do that most players will realistically play the game with Affection maximized for all their Pokémon.)
Again, BDSP strikes again with a game-altering mechanic that cannot be easily disabled or circumvented by the player. Although the Affection System impacted my experience much less so than the Exp. Share, it still played a role in diminishing my enjoyment of battles in-game. The battle effects tied to the Affection Mechanic were so broken, and occurred frequently enough by the end of the game to the point where most of the major battles I won came down to a lucky miss or critical hit. For instance, I vividly remember my victory against the Champion being decided by a super-effective move failing to connect. My next attack took out the opposing Pokémon, which sealed the victory as this Pokémon would have swept my entire party if I did not knock it out then. Even though the Affection System enabled me to win a handful of difficult battles, these victories all felt particularly hollow and unearned because Affection enabled me to overcome an otherwise unwinnable battle and played a bigger role in the final outcome than my own decision making.
As I alluded to previously, I absolutely love the strategic thinking that epitomizes Pokémon battling, and this is precisely why I am upset with the Affection System essentially being forced upon players and changing an aspect of gameplay that was already perfectly fine. I feel that introducing a such an intense luck-based element to Pokémon battles has taken this defining facet of Pokémon a step backwards, tarnishing the rich, dynamic RPG combat that the franchise has built upon and nurtured for decades.
A More Optimistic Look at the Exp. Share
Reading this piece, some of you are probably thinking the following:
“You did this to yourself! If you played differently, you could have ensured that you had the more challenging gameplay experience you were looking for.”
I do believe that this point is 100% true regarding the Exp. Share (unfortunately nothing can be feasibly done to work around the Affection System), as a different style of gameplay can be undertaken to minimize the likelihood of a team being overleveled. Initially, I felt that the Exp. Share was poorly designed because players had to approach the game “abnormally” to ensure that BDSP matched the difficulty of older Pokémon titles. Upon further reflection, my mentality of pinning all the blame on the Exp. Share does not make total sense when you consider that I was unwilling to revisit my old gameplay style in light of how Pokémon games have evolved over the years. Instead of demonizing new features like the Exp. Share, I think there is also an opportunity to examine them from a different perspective and understand how these features can be taken advantage of to the enhance the overall gameplay experience.
The Exp. Share is a quality of life improvement, and the ability to raise Pokémon faster offers gameplay opportunities that would not have been as easy to perform in older Pokémon titles. The opportunity that comes top of mind is the option to use a larger team, and rotate Pokémon in and out of the party over the course of the game. It would have been difficult to use a team with 12+ different Pokémon in older games with how long it would have taken to train each Pokémon up individually and ensure each Pokémon was battle ready. It certainly seems like the newer Pokémon games are well optimized for players to manage larger teams with the Exp. Share and the PC Box being accessible anywhere (rather than at Pokémon Centres only) to switch Pokémon around at any time. I quite like the prospect of raising an expanded and more diverse team of Pokémon to collect all the Gym Badges and defeat the Elite Four / Champion, and I would be willing to embrace this playstyle for future Pokémon games to better adapt to the new EXP mechanics in modern Pokémon games.
As someone who went into BDSP without this in mind however, my failure to account for the impact of the Exp. Share did borderline ruin my experience with the main game and makes me wish that I approached things differently. For players considering to purchase Pokémon BDSP, take my words as a warning and ensure that you make the proper adjustments so the Exp. Share does not significantly impair your gameplay experience.
Despite my criticisms, I still stand behind the notion that BDSP is an impressive remake that radiates the magic of the original Diamond and Pearl games. In my opinion, it is a great game that is unfortunately let down by some mechanics that could have been designed and executed better. I think almost everything else implemented in the game was stellar and sets a good example for the polish and high quality players should expect from a Pokémon remake.
I hope that this piece does not dissuade readers entirely from giving Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl a try. I just do not want anyone else to have the same experience I did with a game that I legitimately feel has many bright spots and noteworthy elements worth experiencing. If anything, I am hopeful that my thoughts on the game are informative for prospective players and helps ensure that their time with the game ends up being memorable for all the right reasons.
