Pokemon Brilliant Diamond, Shining Pearl, and Legends: Arceus will all be missing a big feature

Earlier today, The Pokemon Company hosted a new Pokemon Presents event in which it revealed a lot of new details about Pokemon Brilliant Diamond, Pokemon Shining Pearl, and Pokemon Legends: Arceus. The event showed off a lot of cool stuff, and it’s easy to walk away from that Pokemon Presents show feeling excited about these releases. Unfortunately, the event revealed a key detail about all three games that might derail that excitement for competitive players.

At the end of today’s Pokemon Presents, The Pokemon Company revealed that Pokemon Brilliant Diamond, Pokemon Shining Pearl, and Pokemon Legends: Arceus would not feature a ranked competitive mode. Instead, Pokemon Sword and Shield will continue to be the main vehicle for ranked matches.

While that smakes sense for a new spin-off like Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which seems to change the Pokemon formula significantly, some players will undoubtedly be surprised by the decision to leave ranked battles out of a pair of main-series remakes like Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.

Unfortunately for those of us who want to know more, The Pokemon Company didn’t give a reason why there won’t be any ranked battles in Brilliant Diamond, Shining Pearl, or Legends: Arceus. For that matter, we also don’t know if those games will allow unranked battles over WiFi, though it’s possible that they will, and only ranked mode has been dropped.

For now, though, it sounds like those who want to use the Pokemon they catch in Brilliant Diamond, Shining Pearl, and Legends: Arceus in ranked battles will need to first move them over to Sword and Shield via Pokemon Home. Pokemon Home support is coming to all three games in 2022, though we don’t have a more specific release date than that. We’ll let you know if The Pokemon Company clarifies its decision to drop ranked battles from these three games in the future.