Nintendo recently announced that they will be releasing remastered versions (dubbed “remakes”) of the Diamond and Pearl entries to its series of core Pokemon games, after 15 long years since their original 2006 release. 

The remakes, titled Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, are expected to arrive in late 2021. Because of the changes Pokemon games have gone through over the years since 2006, the online competitive community is looking forward to an interesting new battle experience with the new remakes.

Pokemon (derived from “Pocket Monsters”) is a series of top-down role-playing games where players can train various Pokemon of different types to trade or fight in battles against in-game non-player characters or their fellow players locally and worldwide, and it has a very dedicated following of competitive players. As all of the Pokemon are unique, each generation of the game evolves its own separate competitive “metagame” (which determines which Pokemon are the best to battle with online), based on how their respective Pokemon’s individual stats and move sets play into a team of 6 Pokemon per player in a battle.

“I am thinking that if there is an online competitive ladder for the remakes, it will be a very interesting metagame to participate in,” said Carson Demmond, a competitive Pokemon player whose very first Pokemon game was Diamond. “I suspect it will be a new experience for a lot of players.”

After all, the remakes will be played by both those who have played the originals and those who haven’t, so most of the gameplay itself, which will remain true to the original, will be new for the more recent competitive Pokemon players. Demmond, who was about 9 years old when the original 4th generation games came out, didn’t start to play competitively until the 6th generation of Pokemon games.

In most recent Pokemon games, the player is able to obtain any Pokemon from the previous games on top of any new ones introduced in the new generation by either catching them in-game or trading online with other players. The games are also backwards-compatible, which means that players can transfer their Pokemon from an older game entry to a newer one, but not the other way around. Because Diamond and Pearl were the 4th generation of Pokemon games, they only contain Pokemon from the first four generations– and the remakes are expected to be the same way, in which case none of the Pokemon from generations 5, 6, 7 or 8 will be included in them. 

“There have been a lot of quality of life improvements built into the recent Pokemon games to make it easier to train your Pokemon to be fit for competitive play, and Diamond and Pearl had none of those, so if [the remakes] don’t have those either, it’ll be a very different experience to play competitive Pokemon without them.” 

In the newer generations, it’s very easy for players to quickly get all of their Pokemon from level 1 to level 100 using an array of items and other game mechanics. It’s also much easier for players to understand control the way their Pokemon’s stats change as they grow, so competitive players can put together new teams without sacrificing much time. In the older games, however, Pokemon must be trained one at a time, and getting a Pokemon with good stats requires good breeding and careful battling and item choices.

The limited selection of Pokemon to choose from and the old-fashioned way they are trained seem to be the biggest defining factors for the new metagame. “The thing I’m interested to see is whether the remake metagame will develop in the same way as the [original] Diamond and Pearl metagame, because we’ve already had a competitive format with the same set of Pokemon, but there was a vastly different culture around competitive Pokemon at the time.” 

As an example, Demmond said, “I’m curious about whether any of the few fire-type Pokemon will be good enough to make an impact on the meta, because there are only 2 fully evolved fire Pokemon in the base games– Infernape and Rapidash– and I don’t think Rapidash is a strong inclusion on a competitive team. Infernape isn’t a strong choice in the current meta, but I don’t know how it will compare in the selection of Pokemon available in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.”

Back in 2006, when Diamond and Pearl were originally released, it was also the very first time players could battle online from around the world via wi-fi connection– but, because of the limitations of the internet and the games themselves at the time, both the metagame and competitive scene for the 4th generation games were lost along with any of the now defunct old fan-sites and blogs that might have held any information about them. 

“I think talk about competitive Pokemon used to be restricted to a few forums, but now it’s talked about on more mainstream platforms, like YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, etc.,” Demmond said. But now, in 2021, the online competitive Pokemon community is bigger than ever, and it’s thriving.

“The platforms people use to talk about competitive Pokemon are a lot more numerous and accessible now, so people end up talking about competitive Pokemon more, and the way we think about the competitive Pokemon metagame has also changed a lot. From what I understand, people are much more willing and able to innovate.”

As for the actual implementation of wi-fi battles in the new remakes, not much is known about which features will be the same as the old games and which ones will be different, and whether or not there will be any new features added to the games is still a mystery as well.

Because Nintendo hasn’t released much information about the Diamond and Pearl remakes past a short trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pDI8Scph44), there’s still a lot of speculation surrounding what the actual games will be like. The new 3D-style graphics are a source of both love and disdain from Pokemon fans all over the internet– some people think that the art style is ugly and disappointing, while others are enchanted by the unique and nostalgic look.

Above all, though, after 15 years of waiting, getting to go and spend time in the (remastered) Sinnoh region of the Pokemon world– which is where Diamond and Pearl take place– is a dream come true for many Pokemon fans that grew up exploring it when they were kids.

“I’m very excited,” said Demmon, who is looking forward to revisiting the original 4th generation games through a new lens. “Diamond was my favorite of the games growing up.”