Pokemon Dataminer Explains Why Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl Doesn't Have Pokemon Home Support

A well-known dataminer and Pokemon researcher has pulled back the curtain as to why Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl don't currently have connectivity to the popular Pokemon Home cloud storage system. Nearly five months after its release, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl still can't connect to the Pokemon Home app, a cloud-based system used to store and transfer Pokemon between various recently released Pokemon games. While alleged insiders claim that the support could come as early as this month, one dataminer knowledgeable about the coding of Pokemon games suggests that things are trickier than it seems. 

SciresM, a well-known Pokemon dataminer and researcher on Twitter that has cracked the code of many recent Pokemon games, recently noted that Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl uses an entirely different development platform than other Pokemon games. "[Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is a Unity game," SciresM noted on Twitter. "The normal Pokémon games, including [Pokemon Home], are C++ using a custom engine ("gflib"/gamefreak lib). [Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl] is a Unity game and saves are literally a C# object serialized to disk without specifying offsets which can change between versions."

"Adding support means parsing Pokémon from and updating the save," SciresM continued in a follow-up tweet. "But it's a C# structure using not specified serialization with multiple versions. They'll have to hand roll a C#/unity object deserializer in a non-unity codebase. It's going to be an enormous hack in every way." In layman's terms, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl was coded using a different game engine than other Pokemon games and as such it's not currently compatible with Pokemon Home. In order to transfer Pokemon from Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl to Pokemon Home, ILCA and Game Freak will need to develop a serializer to convert Pokemon from Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl into a format compatible with Pokemon Home (and other Pokemon games.)

The interesting bit about all of this is that ILCA, the company who developed Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, also developed Pokemon Home for The Pokemon Company. So hypothetically, ILCA would have known about these issues at the outset. 

While this explains the delay for Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, SciresM notes that Pokemon Legends: Arceus was built using the custom Game Freak game engine and that while some conversion would be needed due to how Pokemon in that game are built differently (Pokemon in Pokemon Legends: Arceus are missing Abilities and other aspects found in base series games), it's a relatively straightforward conversion.

The Pokemon Company has not provided fans with a timeline for the Pokemon Home compatibility with Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, noting only that it would be added in a future update.