Activity kits turn tables into the Sinnoh Underground and adult Pokémon fans into happy little kids again.

Despite the games’ titles, when Pokémon Diamond and Pearl brought the Pokémon franchise to the Nintendo DS for the first time in 2006, the treasures that players spent hours digging out of the earth weren’t gemstones, but fossils. Diamond and Pearl introduced a massive subterranean level called the Underground, which you could explore and excavate fossils used to revive otherwise unobtainable species of Pocket Monsters.

Nearly 20 years later, those days of digging in Diamond and Pearl’s Underground are still with us, so imagine our excitement when we found out that there are real-world Pokémon Fossil Excavation Kits!

We stumbled across these at our local Pokémon Center superstore branch, and they’re also available for purchase online. Wasting no time, we grabbed one from the shelf, paid for it at the register, and took it home so we could start digging.

Inside the box are four items: a hammer, a chisel, a brush, and a large chunk of plaster, inside which your fossils are waiting to be found.

Just like in the games, you’re told how many items are hidden within the digging area, and in the case of the Pokémon Fossil Excavation Kit, it’s always four. The exact items, though, remain a mystery until you unearth them, with the possibilities being Skull, Armor, Root, and Claw Fossils, plus Heart Scales and a Red/Blue/Green Sphere cluster.

The directions are written in Japanese, but there’s a diagram, and really, the process is pretty intuitive. Place the plaster on a flat, steady surface, hold the chisel above it, then strike the chisel with the hammer to chip away at the plaster.

You don’t want to go swinging the hammer with full force, since you don’t want to accidentally skewer the fossil you’re searching for with the tip of the chisel. You can’t be too timid either, though, because the plaster is hard. Sure, in the games all you needed to do was tap the DS screen with the stylus, but here you’ll need to put enough strength into your hammer hits to create cracks, so modulating the strength of your strikes is key.

After five minutes of hammering we’d worked up some sweat on our brow but still only barley scratched the surface of our excavation area, and were noticing a bit of grittiness in our mouth from leaning in too close as powdered kicked up as pieces chipped off, adding to the illusion of toiling away in the Underground. But then we spotted a different patch of color from the gray we’d been chiseling away.

Carefully altering between using the brush to sweep out debris and the hammer and chisel to dig deeper, we were able to confirm we’d found a fossil, with about 10 minutes having passed since we got started.

Feeling a surge of excitement, we kept at it, and were able to extract…

…an Armor Fossil, looking just like the ones from the game that you use to create a Shieldon.

Finding one item meant we still had three to go, but now we were reenergized. Each swing of the hammer had us feeling like we’d stepped into the Diamond and Pearl world that we’d loved as kids, with the tantalizing promise of more wonders just out of sight egging us on. We also felt like we were starting to get the knack for using our excavation tools, so we figured we’d have the remaining three items up and out of the plaster in no time.

This turned out to be not the case at all, though. We kept digging and digging, but couldn’t find a trace of a fossil, triggering flashbacks of expeditions deep into the underground where we’d taken a route that somehow missed all of the treasures we knew were hiding down there.

But then, finally, following about 20 minutes of digging since finding the Armor Fossil, we got a glimpse of the second fossil.

Slowing down and making more careful movements, we began clearing away more of the plaster around it so that we could pry it out…

…only to find that there was another item buried right next to it! And then we found the fourth and final item not very far away from the fossil on its opposite side.

So it looks like the items really are placed randomly within the plaster, and depending on where you start digging and which direction you go from there, it could be either a very short or very long time between finding each of them.

▼ In addition to the Armor Fossil, our kit also contained a Skull Fossil, Heart Scale, and Spheres (though the Spheres are actually more like discs).

At a price of 3,520 yen (US$24), the Pokémon Fossil Excavation Kit isn’t the cheapest piece of Pokémon merch around, and since it’s something you literally have to crack, pulverize, and otherwise break to play with, there’s not really any replay value either.

But we absolutely enjoyed taking this nostalgic trip down into the memory mineshafts, and if you’d like to too, the kit can be ordered through the Pokémon Center Online store here.

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[ Read in Japanese ]