Pokémon Diamond and Pearl for the DS are getting “faithful” remakes in the form of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl on Switch later this year, the Pokémon Company announced in a livestream today.
The games take place in the Sinnoh region, one of the series’ more naturalistic settings, with players adventuring while accompanied one of either the Turtwig, Chimchar, or Piplup Pokémon starters. “The sense of scale of the towns and routes has been carefully preserved,” the company said during the presentation.
Here’s the trailer:
The Gen 4 remakes will be handled by developer ILCA rather than directly by GameFreak, but with the games’ original director, Junichi Masuda, overseeing the project. They’ll make use of a chibi-3D art style while still remaining top-down while exploring the world. Battles, meanwhile, look like they’ll follow a more modern look in line with the recent 3DS and Switch Pokémon games. The remakes will also apparently include some new quality-of-life improvements over the originals, though the Pokémon Company did not share exactly what those would be yet.
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl were originally released for the DS back in 2007, and were the first games in the series to let players battle, trade, and communicate online. The entire series has been slowly remade over the decades, most recently with overhauls to Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire on the 3DS in 2014. The Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl remakes will serve to tide fans over until a new open-world set of games called Pokémon Legends Arceus is released next year.