Topic: Pokémon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl

Did anyone see the episode where Spiritomb was more powerful than some legendaries?

Good times.

@Eel They got rid of double battles in the recent games? I really must not be paying attention if that's the case.

@VoidofLight Double battles are still a thing, but only the normal trainer pairs like the twins, and stuff. Starting with Emerald, they made it possible to have two separate trainers join if they saw you at the same time (and you had more than one pokemon), but you could also fight them individually in most cases.

At some point they just... Stopped doing it. If you go and see a video of the Saffron Dojo in Pokemon Let's Go, you can see the pairs of blackbelts there can see you at the same time, but they wait their turn to challenge you. In Emerald, or the DS games, that would've triggered a double battle with both blackbelts instead.

@Eel Oh yeah, I vaguely remember that. It's a shame that it no longer triggers double battles, given that it saves the player time.

@VoidofLight I don't know about unique ways of getting certain pokémon, but Sword and Shield still had a couple of new and unique evolution methods, like getting multiple critical hits in a fight with a galarian farfetch'd or the whole deal with passing through a specific spot with a galarian yamask at a HP threshold.

Oh look.. our favorite resident pokemon fan.. here to berate people for having hope, and to say that these games suck.

Anyways, the new underground seems interesting. Some of the areas sort of remind me of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon in a way.

Haha yeah they do remind me of Mystery Dungeon, mainly the ones for 3DS.

@Kid_Buu how can they notice it, if the game isn't in our hands yet?

@Kid_Buu Hm.. It's way too blurry to really say what it is for sure, aside from it being just a generic painting on the wall. Generally, if they were hinting towards a future game, they'd probably make it more apparent, like the tiki head you get in gen 6, or the fact that Galar shows up in the Gen 7 anime, as well as on a map or globe in Let's Go.

I'd love to actually see a region based off of Italy, but as of right now, there's not much to really go off of.

If Pokemon Gen 9 will be based on Italy, it should have 80's Disco Italiano music. 😎

I'm actually going to a Vang Gogh exhibit at the weekend. He's strangely over and under rated as an artist at the same time, people focus so much on his tortured history as a mythology that folk kinda forgot how legit brilliant his work is.

So with just under two months until release, I'm wondering how the EXP share is going to work in this game. I know the EXP mechanic was overhauled in X and Y, so my question is whether they'll use that system or the older EXP share mechanic

@MarkL1987 They're probably going to be using the Sword and Shield EXP share system that you can't turn off.

@VoidofLight In that case, that would eliminate the need for grinding

@MarkL1987 Yeah, but I kind of wish they'd let you turn it off.

Have they confirmed that Poffins only affect Contest stats? They aren't going back to that horrible candy system they had in LGPE, right?

Goodness I hope not. I hated that system. One of the worst ideas in the history of the franchise.

@Heavyarms55 It’s probably just going to be contests, given that I doubt they’re changing too much of the original game’s mechanics

It would be really stupid of them to do that, given that this decision caused lots of criticism. What does it hurt to provide a more difficult option?

@chipia Eh, from what I’ve played from going back to older games, it’s less difficult and just more grindy.

I think they might go back to the previous style, where you can turn the exp share off. It’s possible.

To be honest, more than making the game harder, sometimes I just want to carry a Pokémon around without having it get EVs or experience from random battles it did not participate in. That’s impossible with the forced sharing.

Also I wouldn’t worry about these games borrowing anything important from Let’s Go, given they’re being made by entirely different people and not meant to be similar.