New nuggets of information have emerged regarding the long-awaited next mainline Pokemon game entry Pokemon Winds and Pokemon Waves for the Nintendo Switch 2. The games were apparently scheduled for this month, but were pushed back at the last moment as they simply were not ready for release. This in turn caused massive scheduling issues for The Pokemon Company across its games and media.
- The decision to delay Winds & Waves from November 2026 to November 2027 was made at the very last moment in January, the games just weren’t ready yet.
- This caused a huge amount of scheduling issues across all The Pokémon Company’s projects.
- The anime is the most affected as the original plan was to end Pokémon Horizons in episode 136 but TPC convinced the anime producers to make an extra arc to tease Gen 10 with Navi having Konetsu.
- However due to the last minute delay they had to scrap a lot of their plans for the Gen 10 arc and replace Konetsu with Ditto.
- The Pokémon anime will go on hiatus starting on March 2027 until around September/October 2027.
- The reworked Gen 10 arc in Pokémon Horizons will now debut late 2027 and have around 25 episodes.
- Pre-production on the next Pokémon anime is underway however due to all delays it’s not expected to launch before 2029.
- Ash is not planned to come back, the new series will again focus on all regions.
I imagine it caused massive scheduling issues for Nintendo too as they would have needed to adjust all their other releases to account for the hole it left. You have to say it’s impressive that it hasn’t noticeably shown up like that.