Pokémon HOME getting support for Brilliant Diamond, Shining Pearl, and Legends Arceus “soon”

Pokémon HOME is finally getting updated to support transfers for Pokémon Brilliant Diamond, Shining Pearl, and Legends Arceus. When, exactly? We don’t know!

The news comes to us from an official post on both the English and Japanese Pokémon websites, which give a bunch of details about how the process will work, new features, and some nice bonus gifts for using the service. They also include this absolutely nonsense transfer chart, which appears to be some sort of Eldritch horror or biblically accurate angel.

As you (maybe) can tell from the chart, both Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl and Legends Arceus will support transferring both in and out of Pokémon HOME. This means you can use Pokémon obtained in other games and generations in Pokémon Legends Arceus, and use Pokémon obtained in Legends Arceus in Sword & Shield and Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl. For those Pokémon, since modern Pokéballs don’t exist in Legends and ye olde Pokéballs don’t exist in BDSP, Pokémon transferred in this way will use a fun new Pokéball called a Strange Ball. If you’re playing Sword or Shield, Pokémon caught in ye olde Pokéballs will use normal balls, which seems like a missed opportunity to use Timer Balls but who am I to judge?

There’s a few updates coming to the HOME apps as well, including the ability to view Pokédex data from different games, rather than just one unified National Dex as it currently is. You’ll also get some gifts for depositing Pokémon from BDSP and PLA — Sinnoh starters with their Hidden Abilities for the former, and Hisui starters with maxed out effort levels for the latter. There is one minor restriction, brought about by the prevalence of cloning glitches previously in BDSP — special Pokémon like Legendaries from those games that would normally only be available once can only be transferred to HOME once per save file. This means that, if you were legitimately traded one of these Pokémon, you would not be able to transfer it in addition to your own. A small restriction that is unlikely to come up often, but undoubtedly frustrating for some.

As for exactly when this update will be live, we have absolutely no idea. The Pokémon Company says it’ll be “in the coming weeks”, which means it could be live tomorrow, or it could be live at the end of June. We’ll let you know either way.