Pokémon Dread

This is going to be a big year for the Pokémon franchise. February, 27, will mark thirty years since the original Red and Green games were released in Japan. The company always announces new projects on Pokémon Day, so there’s high expectations for a major milestone to mean major games.

And I am filled with dread.

When Is Enough, Enough?

I love Pokémon. When I was speaking with a specialist to get an autism diagnosis, she asked me about Pokémon, and I talked so much that she just replied, “That definitely counts as a special interest.” I’ve been playing the games since elementary school, when my brother briefly traded with one of his classmates one of his games for a copy of SoulSilver (which my dad later made us give back).

Even with complaints of the series stagnating and the mainline games getting repetitive, I’ve always been able to enjoy myself. There’s not a Pokémon game I’ve played that I can’t gush about in some way, and that includes the bug-riddled Scarlet and Violet.

So why is there a pit in my stomach when I think about what might be announced in a month?

Part of it is simply being overwhelmed. I’ve had a lot of fun with Pokémon Legends Z-A, which came out last October, and Pokémon Pokopia, the new life-sim, is coming out in March. Between those two, I have enough Pokémon to keep myself entertained for a long time.

However, the GameFreak leaks last year imply we could be looking at the next mainline games in 2026 as well. Not only is that shockingly close to Legends Z-A’s release, but it mirrors the way Pokémon Legends Arceus was only able to be the new game for a short while before Scarlet & Violet launched. And the consensus is that those games were rushed.

I already said I enjoyed the Gen IX games, and I do. Nemona is one of my favorite rivals in the series, and it’s one of the best stories in a mainline game so far. But I won’t pretend that makes up for the state they released in. Those games could have spent another year cooking— or even waited until the Switch 2 came out— and across the board, the response would have been more positive.

A repeat of Scarlet and Violet’s launch just to have Gen 10 launch on Pokémon’s 30th anniversary isn’t worth it. Especially since the new games sound incredibly ambitious, and the few details we have make them seem huge.

That’s another source of my dread: I don’t need another big game in my backlog. Or even an ongoing game. The same leak that featured Gen 10 info also mentioned plans for an MMO and including an MMO mode, and it sounds like everything that has been making the franchise worse.

Retaining Player Attention

A trend I’ve written about before in the Pokémon series is the shift in recent years to promoting competitive and including online features. It started more or less with Gen VIII, when the games forewent expansive post-game content in favor of ongoing online raids. If players wanted certain Pokémon, they had to keep coming back to the game, pay for Nintendo Switch Online, and beat a raid with several strangers.

Gen IX made this more explicit. Not only were the raids now offering Pokémon players couldn’t get in-game at all are there right from the start, but a lot of focus was put on ensuring that the basics of competitive battling are available in-game.

Unlike Legends Arceus, Legends Z-A features an extensive online mode, one that players will have to take part in at least once every month if they want to obtain certain Mega Stones that can’t be found anywhere else. It was also heavily advertised before the game was released.

Finally, Pokémon Champions is set to be the new official competitive mode for the VGC World Championships when it drops; with its ability to rent Pokémon, extensive streamlining of all the tedious training competitive players used to have to do, and availability on mobile devices, Pokémon’s push to get more players into the competitive scene is clear.

Like many other game franchises, Pokémon is moving away from tight, single-player focused games to ones with ongoing online features so that players will keep coming back instead of trying to do something like play another game.

If Pokémon put their focus on keeping Champions updated and thus doesn’t try to rush out new games so the meta could have a new format after three years of the same basic mechanics, that’d be great. But Champions is already confirmed to have microtransactions, and considering the trend with mainline games and other mobile games, fans have a right to be wary of whether it’ll actually help solve the pay-to-win nature of competitive Pokémon.

I don’t want to live in a world where Pokémon means paying $70 to get my foot in the door, and then pay another $30 for the post-game, plus online, and a Pokémon HOME subscription, and then have to keep coming back to the game every month for content I might never be able to get again.

I don’t want to live in a world where getting into competitive means downloading a phone app and either grinding out in-game currency to upgrade my Pokémon to competitive standard or paying $20 to buy Battle Points.

But all signs point to Pokémon Day being the harbinger of all those things I hate. Every game these days needs to monopolize players’ time, even one of the most profitable franchises in the world, apparently.

When I was a kid, I could get SoulSilver, plug it into my DSi, and play everything without having to download anything or worry about internet connection. And then I could play other games or read other books. Then I always came back.

But now? The fact that I always have to check online to see what the current event is to make sure I don’t miss anything makes me want to play less.