During the Pokémon Presents broadcast this week, The Pokémon Company announced remakes of the Nintendo DS games, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. While Game Freak normally handles games like this, right now, it’s busy with the open-world prequel Pokémon Legends: Arceus, which is due out next year.
This leaves the release of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl in 2021 in the hands of a Japanese studio called ILCA. Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda will oversee the project as a director, alongside ILCA’s Yuichi Ueda. If you’re not familiar with this studio, here’s a quick rundown:
Who is ILCA?
ILCA, Inc. is a Japanese studio headquartered in Tokyo, with other offices located in Shinjuku, Nagoya and Kyoto. It was established on 1st October 2010 as a CG-based video production company focused on animation, movies and television, and eventually incorporated video game development. As of 1st December 2020, it has 288 employees.
What does the ILCA logo look like?
Here it is in all its glory (without those lovely walls):
So who is in charge?
ILCA is led by CEO Takuya Iwasaki and the director Satoshi Takamori.
What does ILCA stand for?
According to the company’s website, ILCA is named after the acronym “I Love Computer Art”.
“I LOVE COMPUTER ART”
Has the studio worked on any Pokémon projects before?
Yes – before the Diamond and Pearl remakes it was responsible for the cloud-based storage app, Pokémon HOME.
What other games has it worked on?
As we previously mentioned, ILCA is a support studio. As a result, it’s worked on all sorts of games including regular ones, augmented reality titles, virtual reality games, and various other stuff including a Domino’s pizza app featuring Hatsune Miku.
Some more serious projects it’s assisted with include Yakuza 0, Dragon Quest XI, NieR: Automata, Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 and more recently Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown.
What will ILCA’s Diamond and Pearl remakes be like?
Here’s what you can expect, according to the announcement PR:
“Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl enable fans to experience the original story and game features from Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl in a fresh way. The original games have been faithfully reproduced and colourfully revitalized for Nintendo Switch.
“The sense of scale of the towns and routes has been carefully preserved, and fans who played the original games will recognize many familiar places. These games are updated with the easy-to-understand, player-friendly conveniences introduced in recent Pokémon core series video games, in addition to up-close-and-personal Pokémon battle scenes.”
Want to know more about ILCA?
Sure, head on over to the company’s official website – it’s even hiring! There are also official Twitter and Facebook pages.
So, there’s your crash course in ILCA – the team behind Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Think it’s got what it takes to remake the Generation IV Pokémon games? Share your thoughts down below.