This is part eight of our official Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl complete guide and walkthrough, which picks up right after you beat your rival in Hearthome City. Now it's time to head through Solaceon Town in order to reach Veilstone City and defeat its gym leader, Maylene.
The first major point of interest on this route is the Lost Tower, which is▨ skippable at this part of the game if you’d rather just get on with it. Basically, the only thing you actually need from the Lost Tower is the HM for Strength, which you can’t even use outside of battle until you get another four gym badges. If you just want to get to the next gym already, it’s probably best to sprint through Route 209 and come back later with a bunch of Repels. If you’re the type of person who’d rather get things out of the way as soon as they present themselves, off you go. We’re going to continue this guide based on the assumption that you either a) have decided to skip the Lost Tower or b) have got Strength and are now back on Route 209, ready to keep moving forward.
There are a few houses in Solaceon Town and the Solaceon Ruins are teeming with Unown, although for the sake of clarity and brevity we’re going to treat those as things to come back to later on. For now, walk directly through Solaceon Town until you reach Route 210 and come into contact with a group of immovable Psyduck. Given that these Psyduck are apparently here to stay, your only option is to head right towards Veilstone City. There’s some slight zig-zagging involved here, but as long as you're making consistent progress to the east, you’re on the right track and should reach Veilstone in no time.
When you arrive in Veilstone, your first objective should be to heal up at the Pokemon Centre and take on the local gym. There are various other points of interest here - the Department Store and Team Galactic HQ stand out as two prominent examples - but there’s little use in visiting them when a) you can’t afford anything a normal Poke Mart wouldn’t sell and b) you can’t move freely through the building because it’s reserved for later on in the story. The faster you beat the gym and the rest of the gyms that come after it, t𒀰he faster these other places are able to reach their full potential.
Once you enter the gym, you’ll notice right off the bat that its trainers specialise in Fighting-type Pokemon. I mean, it’s a dojo full of people with black belts - they🅘’re hardly raising Fairies.
The gym puzzle is initially a bit annoying, but it’s easy when you break it down and ignore the tantalising pull to focus on the middle section. You need to clear the sides first so that you can move the final two boards just in front of the gym leader, Maylene. Once the final stairs are unobstructed, you can focus on the middle to carve out a little path for yourself. Make sure you battle all four of the gym trainers before taking on Maylene, though - while a Staravia will easily take out her first two Pokemon, her ace is a Lucario who packs a mean Drain Punch. Anyone who picked Chimchar will have a pretty easy time here - otherwise, you'll probably want to get yourself a Machop or Geodude and raise it until it's at least the same level as Lucario. At this point, you should be able to outmaneuver it with super-effective hits.
With Maylene taken care of, it’s time to move on to part nine of our complete Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl walkthrough: Getting Dawn’s Pokedex back and heading to Pastoria C🔴ity.