World wide stock shortages for desirable luxury items like consoles, sneakers, GPUs and Pokémon merch aren’t just happening in the real world because of the pandemic, but it also seems to have spread to the fictional world of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.
In our playthrough of Brilliant Diamond recently we made out way to Veilstone City which houses the Metronome Style Shop. Here players can buy outfits for their characters to wear during the adventure.
Because all Pokémon games are technically RPGs and it’s a given that you talk to every single NPC in an RPG, we asked around inside the shop to see what was going on.
One NPC had this to say:
You know the old saying: “if you don’t laugh, you have to cry”.
Anything with a Pokémon logo on it for the first two years has been in low supply and chronically sold out. We covered this just a few months ago when another official announcement had been made that production efforts for the Pokémon card game would be ramped up as a recent launch of an expansion was impossible to find.
The reason for the boom in popularity of the card game, as well as many other Pokémon products, is a complex topic.
The first obvious problem is the pandemic and the problems it causes for sourcing raw materials, staffing, delivery and more. This is not unique to Pokémon merch but it is, of course, a contributor.
Another factor is that so many people are staying inside nowadays with extra time – and some extra money saved up usually – that they are now using to pursue old hobbies like Pokémon.
Many other factors are at play especially various celebrities taking an interest in the hobby with People like Logan Paul, Logic, Steve Aoki and more all bringing more eyes to the topic.
Many agree that Pokémon is experiencing a second boom not seen since the late 90s / early 2000s when it first exploded into popularity. This high demand coupled with low supply has caused so much merch to be unavailable for purchase.
All of this feeds into the simple line of dialogue from an NPC and why it’s so heart-breaking to read. Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were developed by ILCA and not Game Freak itself, so we have to imagine there’s some diehard fans at the ILCA office who have experienced these stock shortages before and thought to include this in the games.
For those wondering this line of dialogue doesn’t appear in the original games as far as we can tell. We charged up a Nintendo 3DS and put in our physical cartridge of Diamond to take a look.
The Metronome Style Shop doesn’t exist in the originals from 2006, and instead the Veilstone Game Corner stands in its place.
