Pokemon Sword and Shield are just 5 months away from release. Although Zelda: Breath Of The Wild 2 has been getting most of the attention at this year’s E3, director Shigeru Ohmori and producer Junichi Masuda have been doing a lot of interviews too. In fact, the pair were interviewed by USGamer and talked about a variety of things related to Pokemon Sword and Shield. Firstly, they talked about the post-game. Ohmori said that “I can’t really say too much today, of course, but I do want to say it’s not just the story, and then you’re done with the game. We’ve got a lot of content for players to enjoy after they finish the story. Also, for players who are really big fans of the battle system and the competitive scene, there’s going to be a lot for them to engage with”
Unfortunately, not all of Pokemon’s headlines have been great. It was confirmed that Pokemon Bank compatibility with Sword and Shield will only be limited to Pokemon that are on the Galar Pokedex, and people are not happy about this. Masuda was asked why the decision was made to do this. Masuda explained that “there are a couple of different parts to the thinking behind it, but really the biggest reason for it is just the sheer number of Pokemon. We already have well over 800 Pokemon species, and there’s going to be more added in these games. And now that they’re on the Nintendo Switch, we’re creating it with much higher fidelity with higher quality animations. But even more than that, it’s coming down to the battle system. We’re making sure we can keep everything balanced and give all the Pokemon that appear in the games a chance to shine.
We knew at some point we weren’t going to be able to indefinitely keep supporting all of the Pokemon, and we just found that Sword and Shield would probably be a good point to go back and reevaluate what would be the best selection of Pokemon that appeal to the widest audience while keeping into consideration the balance of the battle system. It isn’t just going to be all-new Pokemon in the Galar region Pokedex; there’s still going to be a lot of favorites that fans will be able to bring over that they’ve adventured with previously. But yeah, it was pretty much just balancing and getting this optimal selection of Pokemon for the adventure we wanted to provide”.
I guess completing the national dex isn’t one of them tho 😔
Am i the only Pokemon fan that really dosn’t care about the national dex?
Since they’ve released Pokemon Bank, I don’t really care too much about the natioanl Pokedex, either. Mainly because it makes it very easy to just migrate your Pokemon from the previous generations if you have caught them all at some point, so having the national Pokedex doesn’t really add a lot of value anymore (unless you’re catching them all from scratch again, but with over 800 Pokemon already, I don’t really feel like doing that in the slightest).
No one *really* cares about the national dex. It’s just an excuse for pathetic man-children to pitch a bitch fit over a children’s video game because being outraged is the only thing that sustains their utterly pathetic lives (see also: Resistance Movement).
In all honesty, I think they haven’t finish d modelling all the Pokémon. That explains why we had Let’s Go last year.
They have all the Gen 1 Pokémon sorted outlet… But to modell and rig over 800 Pokémon within this time frame is pretty unrealistic.
On the bright side… It’s a console game so we can have Pokémon DLC. So I wouldn’t rule out National Pokédex and New regions with new Pokémon from other Gens
The models were done years ago. They future proofed the franchise in the black and white days. The issue would more likely be balance and storage space. Switch carts are only up to 32gb for now but even with more, at some point, they are going to have too many to store
Pretty sure they don’t remodel every pokemon, more just port over them.
I gotta wait 186 days for pokemon shield. I am disappointed some of my pokemon on moon version won’t make it to shield. I gotta check sites like serebii to see who survived the Junichi Masuda Thanos snap.
We might not be able to dynamax wailord or alolan exeggutor :(
I canceled my preorders for both games
Wow, you are one asily angered person. You do know not all Pokémon were available in, say, Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire either, right ?
+Romain Becker
Actually, that’s not exactly correct, all Pokemon were coded into the game, it’s just you didn’t have access to them until Pokemon FireRed and Leafgreen came out.
This is the first time in main series history that Pokemon have straight up been removed.
silly. clearly didn’t want to buy the games that much in the first place
Well such a shame. I was hoping for our past Pokemon’s to be transfer to a new game, but i guess that option was out of the question. We won’t see much new Pokemon in the game but my guess is will be 100 and new Pokemon not 150 all the time.
Isn’t that… basically what every Pokemon game does though?
no, they’ve never once made it so only certain pokemon can’t be transferred over. After gen 2 nothing could be but that was due to technical incompatibility, not a development time/balance issue.
Wrong, many games in the series don’t allow it.
What does “Transferring over” have to do with what I’m talking about?
I was talking about the Post-story content.
Every Pokemon game gave you something extra to do after you beat the Elite Four (A.K.A. The Final Boss(es) of EVERY Pokemon game).
I like how people are super salty about the whole national dex thing, but pokemon home won’t be out until early 2020 regardless, so there’ll be a number of months where none of us will be able to transfer anything anyways.
This pokedex thing just reminds me of the kalos regional indicator thing that everyone was pissed about in X and Y and how you couldn’t use transferred pokemon in certain parts of the game or for competitions so you actually had to breed and train your pokemon again instead of sitting on a comp ready team from the get-go.
I think they had already promised a lot of post-story content for Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee, yet I didn’t really play those games for a very long time after completing the story. I guess “a lot of content” doesn’t necessarily meant that you’re also going to enjoy that content.
Locking a lot of Pokemon out of the game, though, yeah, that’s a bit of a bummer. I think they had to do that at some point, and ultimately it makes for a higher-quality game, but that being said, they should have probably started that with gen 2 already and never even allowed so many Pokemon in any game to begin with, since that just makes people feel like having access to all Pokemon was an integral part of Pokemon games, so now they’re disappointed and feel cheated.
I do think this is ultimately the right decision, but for people who like very few Pokemon to begin with, it might be very difficult getting into the new versions now.
If they wanted to update the Pokemon models, I can understand not having all 800 ready to go on day 1 of the games’ release. Unlike a game like Mario Tennis where you only have to add around 20-30 characters with updated models, Pokemon has over 800 characters they have to add to the game with updated models so Mario Tennis (and other games that only have to add a couple dozen characters) aren’t on the same level as Pokemon. So bring on the patches & free DLC that add the missing Pokemon into the game later on (if they have time to do so before they decide to release the next main entry.)
If we aren’t getting the rest of the Pokemon in a patch for the game later down the road for some other bogus reason, THEN I’ll be annoyed. But for now, I get it. This is what happens when you continue a game like Pokemon where you are expected to add new creatures into each & every new main entry for decades: you have to make sacrifices & only bring a select few of the old ones back to the newest game when you decide you want to update the creature models. This should be less of a problem with the next Switch Pokemon game, though, since the Pokemon already in Sword & Shield will already have new models and are future proofed for the next entries on Switch & other home consoles (til they decide to update the models again.)
They haven’t remodeled any of the old pokémon what so ever, they’re just using the old models from the 3ds btw