Pokemon Diamond and Pearl remakes won’t require an HM Mule

As I pointed out the other day, I was really bummed out to hear that Hidden Moves were going to be returning in the Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl remakes coming next month. If you don’t remember, HMs used to be how you’d fly, get across the water, or…cut through bushes. By teaching a bunch of mostly useless moves to Pokemon or else you’d be stuck behind an arbitrary story wall.

Luckily, Pokemon’s official Twitter account spread the word that HMs are going to work a lot more different now.

Now, instead of having a Bidoof in your party that knows Cut, Surf, and Waterfall as well as spreading out Fly, Defog, Strength, Rock Climb, and more, you instead get a special thing on your Poketch that allows you to send a request out to a wild Pokemon that will run over and do the thing for you.

Not entirely certain why there’s weird Pokemon hanging out ready to do freelance labor but you know what? If I can just have a Pokemon show up and help me instead of forcing there to be a Pokemon in my party that’s just there strictly for manual labor it’s probably a win/win for everyone.

Anyways, this is a huge thing for me because oh my god can I not stand HMs, and I was so happy when I got rid of them. Before the Pokemon games got more advanced, HMs were always the stand-in for the Metroidvania style “oh you can’t go this way because you can’t…cut a bush.”

Glad to see the concept of the HM Mule will stay dead.

This is a good sign and it makes me really excited to see how they changed the other aspects of Diamond and Pearl to help get rid of a lot of the various things the older Pokemon games had that just made them feel like they were filled with straight-up chores.

Now, if only they’ll tell us how the stuff from Platinum is going to fit into this. My money’s still on paid DLC but we shall see.