After last week's Pokemon Presents, many fans around the world are excited to play Pokemon Legends: Arceus and the remakes of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. Pokemon Legends: Arceus is a more complex game than people thought, and it goes as far as including stealth and action elements that make its gameplay similar to Dark Souls in a certain way. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl showed their new and revamped features, which are a big improvement from the original Generation 4 games.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus and Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl have several things in common, with the first and most obvious being that they both are set in the region of Sinnoh. In Pokemon Legends: Arceus, however, the region was still called Hisui, and the game takes place when people and Pokemon did not live side-by-side as in modern entries. Pokemon Legends: Arceus also features Team Galactic in a different way than Gen 4 games, as the villainous team are instead supportive characters interested in field research. Yet, Pokemon Legends: Arceus also seemingly pokes fun at Pokemon Diamond and Pearl for a few reasons.
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Fire-type Pokemon in Pokemon Legends: Arceus
Pokemon Diamond and Pearl were regarded by many as games that could have been better, be it because of how sluggish combat speed and surfing speed could feel, or the fact that there were so few Fire-type Pokemon to catch. In Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, players could catch Ponyta as a wild Fire-type Pokemon alongside Legendary Pokemon and Eevee's evolution, Flareon. Because Eevee only became available later in the game, Flareon ended up being locked behind the postgame content, meaning that all those players who didn't start the game with Chimchar were essentially forced to catch and train a Ponyta or give up on Fire-type Pokemon altogether.
There were other Fire-type Pokemon in those games, but both Magmar and Vulpix were locked unless players had either Pokemon FireRed or LeafGreen cartridges in their Nintendo DS. Pokemon Platinum did fix some issues, and it added another Fire-type Pokemon to compensate in the form of Houndour. Still, it seems that the lack of Fire-types will plague Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl as well, albeit perhaps not as much.
As for Pokemon Legends: Arceus, it is set in Sinnoh in feudal times, but even though they are the very same region Pokemon Legends: Arceus will have more Fire-type Pokemon than Generation 4 games at launch, even if no more new Fire-types are revealed or included in the final game.
Pokemon Legends Arceus so far features the following Fire Pokemon: Cyndaquil, Growlithe, Vulpix, Ponyta, Magmar, Flareon, and Chimchar. While Cyndaquil's presence might be explained by the game's professor being a traveler, this list poses the question as to what happened to Growlithe in the original games, especially because it has a regional form in Hisui. With seven Fire-types against the three of Pokemon Pearl and Diamond – at least in the base game – Pokemon Legends: Arceus does seem to make fun of its predecessors in a way. Still, because most of those Fire-types were included in Pokemon Platinum, it's possible that the difference lies in the lore.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus will be available exclusively for the Nintendo Switch on January 28, 2022.
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