Let’s talk about the Experience Share. The Experience Share (Exp. Share for short) is a simple tool, present in every main series Pokémon game since 1999’s Pokémon Gold and Silver, that shares the experience one Pokémon gains from defeating others in battle with the others in your party. It’s useful for a few things, but the big one is your experience of the game itself: the Exp. Share is the single most influential tool you have for manipulating the difficulty of the game, helping your whole team level up faster with it on, or slower with it off.
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl review
- Developer: ILCA
- Publisher: Pokémon Company International, Nintendo
- Platform: Played on Switch
- Availability: Out now on Nintendo Switch.
Over the years, as public tastes have changed – and main series developer Game Freak’s with them – it’s become kinder, moving from sharing experience with just a single other Pokémon to with your whole party, then experience itself changed from being earned just via battles to all successful catches of wild Pokémon, too. And then finally, most generously and most dramatically, with the arrival of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl it’s also now been locked to “on” for the entirety of generation eight.
In the other generation eight games, Pokémon Sword and Shield, this isn’t too big a deal – the games themselves were, at least in theory, built around things working that way, and so whatever you may think of their pacing, the opposition trainers, their Pokémon and their levels were placed in that game with the mechanic in mind, the game created with some intention towards it as a whole. But Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, naturally, aren’t built from the ground up to accommodate an always-on Exp. Share.