OPERATION LAST BUS HOME DIARIES: Pokémon Diamond
It's been... how shall we say? A hot minute since I last gave an update on my mission to empty out all of the legendary pokémon, special pokémon available from in game trades from NPCs and events and get all these guys with as many ribbons as possible from the Pokémon games going all the way back to 2002's Pokémon Sapphire all the way through to Pokémon Violet. The rules of the challenge are here and progress to date from Pokémon Fire Red, Pokémon Colosseum, Pokémon XD Gale of Darkness, Third generation spinoffs and lastly Pokémon Sapphire can be found in the respective hyperlinks. Or for convenience you can find the whole series here. Corners have been cut. Sanity has been tested. I've spent the last eight months sort of and sort of not trying to evacuate the hell out of my copy of Pokémon Diamond, the first mainline pokémon game on the Nintendo DS. Why has it taken so long? What's the hold up? What state did I leave the game in first time around? Listen on to find out intrepid adventurer.
Our sixth entry in this series is the first and once again, definitely not last, time we visit the Sinnoh region. Although we were lucky enough to live through when these games were coming out it's easy to forget and easier to over simplify in hindsight the generational improvements that each mainline Pokémon game brought to the table at the time of release. Pokémon Diamond, Pokémon Pearl and it's 'third' Pokémon Platinum heralded the beginning of the fourth generation of Pokémon games. This generation added pokémon 387-493, from earth turtle Turtwig to GOD OF ALL CREATION Arceus. The new Nintendo DS was the perfect machine for some new gimmicks- the bottom screen of the DS brought us the Pokétch suite of apps- some useful, some utterly pointless. These games took the game to game interactions from cable and that weird GBA plugin thing that came with Fire Red and found their natural home over Wi-Fi for minigames, flag hunting, Wi-Fi Plaza, battling and trading in particular the Global Trade Station (GTS). Unbelievably this was also the generation in which a staple of battling since, physical and special moves, was first introduced. All pokémon moves were given a type either physical attack, special attack or status clearing up some of the confusion over 'physical' and 'special moves' previously. Contests were improved and love it or hate it, the sprawling Sinnoh beneath gave players the opportunity to spelunk to their hearts content. Anyway, precious memories but GET TO THE CHOPPER!
LOCATION: Sinnoh Region (first time around)
SITREP: Pokédex: 491/493 (still no Deoxys and no Darkrai) Playtime: 478 hours. Money: I didn't leave this game in too dire a state $719021. Items: Again a decent selection all things considered with pretty much all in game held items, most of the one and done TMs, berries and a healthy stock of pokéballs. In game team: I'd pretty much cleaned out thanks to the large number of DS Pokémon games each demanding the pokédex get filled. Of note were a lvl 59 Bibarel (the OG Bibarel caught as a level 3 bidoof on July the 31st 2007 four days after launch in Europe!) with Surf, Cut, Rock Climb and Strength and a Staravia on flight deck duty.
OBJECTIVE 1: Diamond and Pearl had a frankly silly number of Legendary and Mythical Pokémon. On a normal run of the game, players would have the chance to catch the relevant box legend, in my case Dialga,the three lake nephews; Huey, Dewy and Louis. Then, when the game significantly opens up after you beat the Sinnoh Elite Four and complete the Sinnoh Pokédex, one can gain access to Heatran, Giratina and Cresselia. With the regis from Pokémon Sapphire, Regigigas is also catchable here. There were five event Pokémon- Arceus, Shaymin and Darkrai were accessed by getting event only items and Manaphy and Phione were a neat gift accessed with data from Pokémon Ranger. More on those later.
OBJECTIVE 2: Just four in-game trades in Diamond, Pearl and Platinum: an Abra, Chatot, Haunter and a Magikarp. Interestingly, some... decisions were made by the dev team with these trades. Firstly, the Haunter who you get for a Medicham crushingly has an everstone as held item meaning, you'll have to trade it again without this item to evolve it into a Gengar. I guess it teaches you about asshole trades, useful in the generation that introduced the GTS. In English language versions of DPP, the Abra, Chatot and Haunter have a very hidden extra bonus in that they are treated by the game as being traded from a Japanese version in the game granting exp gaining bonus and the foreign trade benefit for the Masuda method of breeding. The Magikarp is treated as German in origin in all but German versions of the game where it also has Japanese origin. Another barely noticeable benefit is that the Chatot you can get already has some boosts in its competition stats.
 |
| The differences between Norton's Charap from Pokémon Diamond (left) and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond (right). |
OBJECTIVE 3: Following in Pokémon Sapphire's footsteps, there are a whopping 39 ribbons available in this game, 38 of which are newly introduced. There're another 20 contest ribbons, 7 daily ribbons, the footprint ribbon, the Sinnoh champion ribbon, six battle tower ribbons and the three expensive ribbons which can be bought from the ribbon society.
Legends On The Loose
Insider Trading
Ribbon Me This
Fortunately, the remakes of these games and some of the other DS and 3DS games make some of the ribbons first introduced here available again so there's no real pressure to scoop all of these up on the way through. I made the effort to get the footprint ribbon here for as many Pokémon as I could as in Diamond it is given simply when a Pokémon has maximum friendship, in later games it's given for a Pokémon gaining a certain number of levels after it was caught, however, if you're not careful you can lock yourself out of getting the ribbon for Pokémon already too high a level to get the level gain, not to mention the weirdness around 'voiceless' Pokémon. Safer to do it here for my merry band. As I mentioned in the Sapphire post, aside from bragging rights, and if you have them all then please brag away, I'd decided I didn't need to get every single contest and battle ribbon as in the sixth generation games these are all condensed down into just one battle memory or contest memory ribbon the only difference between spending weeks and months grinding out all the battle and contest ribbons is the memory ribbons are a different colour. I did need at least one contest and battle tower ribbon on every Pokémon before leaving this game, however. Getting at least one contest ribbon for each Pokémon was easy enough, the contests in Diamond involve a slightly bizarre dressing up game and dancing minigame as well as the move based version.
Battle Tower Bother
The biggest block here and why dear listeners I'm still stuck on bloody diamond is the battle tower ribbons. As I've mentioned previously 'beating' the battle towers to earn the various commemorative ribbons is one of the most difficult tasks to do in almost every Pokémon game (the exception is Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield which is trivially easy). In Diamond, there are six battle tower ribbons available- one for winning 21 single battles without losing, one for 49 single battles, one for 50 double battles, one for 50 multibattles with an NPC, one for 50 multibattles with a friend and one for ranking 5th place of higher on WiFi battles. This last ribbon hasn't been available for quite some time (and in fact a tiny, tiny detail in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet acknowledges this by granting you the gold coloured Battle Memory ribbon if you have 7/8 of the Sapphire and Diamond battle tower ribbons).
Unlike Pokémon Sapphire, Pokémon Diamond is a little bit more forgiving on the level scaling front for these challenges, however each run starts off easy and quickly gets challenging, every attempt completely resetting with a single loss. Getting any of these ribbons is difficult enough with an highly invested custom team with decent coverages and synergies. Doing so with (checks notes) not-at-all optimised, do not have time to EV train Pokémon like Dunsparce, Xatu and Lumineon just wasn't going to happen. All I need for the battle memory ribbon in later games is just one battle tower ribbon so I aimed to try to clear the 21 single battles. In order to carry some of the weaker 'mon I put some effort into making two very very cheap killers to try to carry a third Pokémon. Step up Metagross and Salamence. However, they still weren't optimised as I'd blitzed through many of the one use decent TMs and didn't quite have the full range of items I'd like. I then kept throwing myself at the single battle tower run. At the time of writing I've only managed to get four Pokémon through to earn the ribbon- that pain in the ass Raikou, that abandoned Muk from XD and old friends MS. NIDO and MIMIEN. Getting to the 21st battle is tedious but not too challenging. It's the last battle that's killed off many of my runs. In order to get the easiest of the Diamond and Sapphire battle ribbons you have to beat Barry's Father, Tower Tycoon Palmer and his team is a shitty scummy cheaty bastard one. He has Dragonite, Milotic and Rhyperior and brings them out in a random order. Depending on the order, Metagross and Salamence can hold their own but when it's a Corsola called COROSO or a Delcatty called SKITIT who's the ace in the back... well. I've still got 49 of the fuckers to get through this gauntlet and to breeze through extremely ribbon light Pokémon Soulsilver, Pokémon White and Pokémon Black 2 with one or two spinoff sidequests too... I'll see you when I get there. IF I ever get there.
Comments
Post a Comment