How to Trade Online & Battle with Friends in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl

Trading and battling is a Pokemon past time as long as the series itself. Going all the way back to the first generation, players could hook their Gameboys up with a link cable and trade and battle Pokemon. This tradition of course continues on in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, but now we can trade online via the internet. In this guide, we’ll go over how to trade and battle online with friends in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.

Trading and Battling Online in Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl have sort of a strange way to trade online as compared to the most recent games. For whatever reason, Game Freak enjoys changing up the way to trade and battle online with every generation, confusing everyone in the process. It’s unclear if they like torturing us or just can’t decide which method is best.

In this case, they are using an updated version of the Gen 4 system of trading: Local/Global Union Rooms. Once you have the first badge, you can head to the basement of any Pokemon center to get a tutorial on how to enter a Global Union Room.

Once you’ve gone through this brief forced walkthrough, you can talk to the lady in the center of the basement counter, and ask to join a Global Room where you can meet random people to either trade or battle. If you want to limit who can join your room, you can select the option to join with a code, and set a code for others to use.

From this room, you can interact with anyone else in there to either trade or battle. It really is as simple as that. The quality of the trades or battles, though, will vary if you’re just trying to meet up with randoms without pre-arranging somewhere else like an online forum. If you want to trade locally with people nearby you, you can instead go to the upstairs Pokemon Center counter and use the Local Union Room instead.

You can also access the Union Rooms at any time once you’ve visited them in-person at least once while outside by entering the Menu with the Y button and selecting which room you want to join.

That’s all you need to know for how to trade and battle online in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. For more FAQs answered and other tips, tricks, and guides visit our Pokemon Shining Pearl and Brilliant Diamond guide wiki and check out our review for our complete thoughts on these remakes.