Fans are eagerly anticipating Pokémon Sword and Shield, but some of the most significant news coming out of summer season was with regards to what will not be in the initially mainline Pokémon console RPGs. For the duration of E3, producer Junichi Masuda explained that not every single Pokémon will make the leap into Sword and Shield. This news left quite a few fans disappointed, so I caught up with Masuda for the duration of our trip for this month’s cover story to dive deeper into the reasoning for the cuts.
According to Masuda, the sheer quantity of Pokémon the series had accumulated more than the final two-plus decades got to the point of becoming unwieldy. “Up till now, we’ve been proud we’ve been in a position to include things like so quite a few Pokémon in the games, but as a outcome of that, there’s basically been rather a handful of functions or gameplay concepts that we’ve had to abandon in the previous,” he says. “Going forward, pondering about the future of Pokémon, we want to prioritize all these new gameplay concepts, new techniques to get pleasure from the game, and want to challenge ourselves at Game Freak to make new techniques to get pleasure from the game. That is actually what drove the choice for this new path.”
The choice was the outcome of collaborative talks among Game Freak, The Pokémon Corporation, and Nintendo. “We have a lot of amazing new challenges that we haven’t even revealed in Sword and Shield,” Masuda says. “We want to continue to come up with these new functions, so we figured this was the ideal path forward for the franchise”
Issues are a bit difficult when diving into how the group decided which Pokémon would not carry more than into the Galar area. “A wide wide variety of discussions occurred it is not just 1 type of criteria for deciding which Pokémon are going to seem in the games, but a lot of unique causes, a lot of unique directions, a lot of debate more than which ones would be the ideal in the game,” Masuda says. “I believe 1 instance of that is figuring out the Pokémon that would make sense for the setting of the game the most these Pokémon appear like they could reside in the Galar area. We actually spent a lot of work deciding which would ideal match the setting of the adventure and the functions that we wanted to implement. I believe players will be happy. There’s rather a handful of Pokémon that you will encounter in the Galar area Pokédex, so I believe players will have exciting seeing all the Pokémon.”
When I ask for specifics about the Pokémon that did not make the reduce for Sword and Shield – like names and total quantity of creatures – Masuda did not elaborate. Nevertheless, he was a lot additional explicit when I asked if reduce Pokémon will return in future games. “Certainly,” he says. “You can appear forward to seeing Pokémon that do not seem in these games appearing in unique regions in future games. I believe Pokémon Dwelling, for a lot of players, will serve as a launching pad to collect them all there and then embark on future adventures.”
Pokémon Dwelling has been announced, but specifics to this point are scarce. Masuda intends on maintaining it that way for a bit longer, but he did supply a bit additional insight into the upcoming app. “We’re actually designing it as the spot for all of your Pokémon with each other, so it is actually critical for the future of the franchise, and it’ll be additional than even Pokémon Bank as a spot to collect all your Pokémon with each other in 1 spot.”
We’ll have to see which Pokémon we encounter in the Galar area when Pokémon Sword and Shield launch November 15.
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