Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl may release with placeholder music

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl may ship with placeholder music according to gameplay footage that has gone viral. The Sinnoh remakes might need a day one patch to get its full soundtrack.

With only a month away from release on November 19th, 2021, Studio ILCA gave the media their first major look at the Pokemon Gen IV remakes with a series of gameplay previews in October.

While the Sinnoh titles are set to get many modern changes, fans noticed something was off about the game’s sound in places. Does Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl have music samples from 2006 in it?

ILCA / The Pokemon Company

The Sinnoh remakes supposedly recycle music samples from 2006.

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl music may be unfinished

The debate surrounding the remake’s music exploded when Pokemon YouTuber Lewtwo highlighted the RPG’s inconsistent soundtrack in a viral series of tweets.  According to a video, it appeared that Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl were using MIDI samples from the 2006 DS titles.

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“So a friend discovered that the Trainer Battle theme in Pokemon BDSP sounds like a MIDI because it uses the default trumpet sample if you were to directly drag the original Diamond & Pearl MIDI directly into Cubase. Currently laughing my a** off,” they wrote, before giving his theory as to why the 2021 release was using the old sounds.

“If anything, this points to (at least the audio) of the game being super rushed or plain unfinished in this preview one month before release. The wild battle (and some other music) sounds fine but some are MIDI farts. We hear this theme in an actual trainer battle as well [as in IGN’s preview coverage],” they said.

It should be pointed out that the old music appears to be in Trainer battles as well as wild Pokemon encounters, while other sections have a modern soundtrack. The inconsistency between new and old sounds had some theorizing that the preview build had placeholder music.

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl Day 1 patch?

Adding fuel to the fire, Pokemon leaks account ‘CentroLeaks’ jumped into the debate and claimed that development on the Sinnoh titles has had problems.

“Just a reminder, a day 1 patch will be required for Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl. I wouldn’t be surprised if the game is shipped with this placeholder music but the day 1 patch contains the final songs. Development for BDSP wasn’t smooth,” the account tweeted.

While it’s unclear whether the game will feature the 2006 MIDI’s in the final version of the game, it has not been confirmed at the time of writing that the songs heard in the preview were placeholder music.

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Interestingly, long-time Game Freak artist Shota Kageyama is composing the music for Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl. However, the Sinnoh remakes are also a joint project with Studio ILCA, so it’s unclear if multiple teams worked on the soundtrack.