#Pokemon diamond and pearl remake full#

First, there were Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee!, simplifications of the first-generation games featuring Pokémon Go mechanics in place of standard battles with wild monsters-a clear ploy to try converting all the Pokémon Go players into the larger Nintendo fold. But in retrospect, the innovation and care brought to those games read like a final sendoff to a bygone handheld era.īut then, in 2018, Pokémon jumped onto the Switch, and things couldn’t have gotten worse for longtime players.

We still got Sun and Moon, the series’ final original mainline titles to debut on a handheld, which featured a fresh approach to the typical story progression arc, a great new cast of characters, and some of the best (and worst) new Pokémon designs. I didn’t want to Pokémon Go to the polls in 2016 I just wanted it to Pokémon Go away. That your grandpa and random neighbors were talking about Pokémon Go wasn’t a good sign-it was a warning sign for fans that expected the brand to be synonymous with exploration, collection, and a sense of achievement, not basic swiping gameplay and simplicity. The turn-based gameplay was replaced with finicky swipe mechanics that never captured the same sense of magic we feel in a classic Pokémon battle. Pokémon Go had hardly any challenge to speak of, nor a story to grant it the series’ iconic sense of adventure. In a craven attempt to capture that sweet, sweet microtransaction cash, Nintendo stopped caring about the quality of their flagship product and started focusing on the soulless, smooth-bodied 3D renderings of our favorite monster pals. And each of these entries came with tons of new, interesting Pokémon to discover and quality-of-life improvements all the way through the fifth generation’s pair, Pokémon Black and White (2010).īut that progress was undone only two years later, starting with the release of mobile game cash cow Pokémon Go. The third generation, made up of Ruby and Sapphire (2003), gave us weather conditions (which thankfully weren’t dependent on the same kind of real-time hardware as their predecessors). The second generation (2000) introduced a real-time clock that affected gameplay (something Nintendo hadn’t actually fully figured out, and which has since been rendered unusable due to long-dead batteries within the original Game Boy cartridges’ plastic shells) and new types of Poké Balls.

#Pokemon diamond and pearl remake full#

After the series’ exciting-but-imperfect debut on the Game Boy in 1998, which featured a vibrant world full of playful new monster friends but still quite a few gameplay kinks to work out, each subsequent pair of entries-or generation as fans know them-began to shine, stuffed full of love, care, and with an abundance of content. In its prime, Pokémon was a thing of intricate beauty.