New Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl Glitch Makes Big Change to the Game's Rival

By Marc Deschamps

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl has found a lot of fans since its release, but players have encountered a handful of strange bugs, which many have been sharing on the Pokemon subreddit. When players begin their journey in the Sinnoh region, they select from one of three Pokemon: Turtwig, Chimchar, or Piplup. Their rival naturally chooses the Pokemon with a type advantage that benefits them, and it evolves over the course of the game. Reddit user nilewater started with Piplup, but they were shocked to discover that their rival had a Prinplup on his team during the battle in Hearthome City!

A screen of the glitch was shared to imgur, and can be found embedded below.

Pokemon BD glitch

Normally, when the player starts with Piplup, their rival selects Turtwig. Nilewater confirms that their first battle against the rival resulted in a skirmish with the Grass-type, but the second battle featured the Water-type evolution, instead. Unfortunately, nilewater has not offered an update yet whether the rival continues to use Piplup's evolutions, or if he ended up going back to using Turtwig's evolutions. Either way, it's a really interesting turn of events!

At the end of the day, this is far from a game-breaking bug, and it's actually kind of a cool one! One of nilewater's fellow Reddit posters even came up with a head canon explanation for what happened. User YTChillVibesLofi suggested that the rival could have "asked the professor for a do over," in order to get a Piplup of his own. Considering that we have no other explanation for how this glitch might have occurred, it's as good an answer as any! For now, we'll just have to wait and see if other players encounter a similar issue. If it does prove to be common, we might see a fix for this issue in a future update for Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl!

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is available now, exclusively on Nintendo Switch. Readers can check out our previous coverage of the game right here.

Have you checked out Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl? Have you encountered this glitch in the game? Let us know in the comments or share your thoughts directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp to talk all things gaming!

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