The National Dex – Could they bring it back?
Pokemon Sword and Shield was shown off during E3 with tons of new news. You can see Pokemon walk around outside, fight gym Leaders in a large spectacle, and the ability to Dynamax your team to do special attacks, like EX attacks in Sun and Moon. Well Pokemon fans are fairly distraught after hearing possibly some of the worst news a longtime pokemon fan will ever hear. Not every Pokemon will appear in Sword and Shield.
Well that sounds unfortunate, does that mean that I won’t be able to bring my vanillish ice-cream Pokemon? Does this mean that my little Aipom won’t make a return here? What about my original team that defeated the pokemon league in Diamond and Pearl, are they gone too? Well we’re not sure about exactly which Pokemon will or won’t make the cut, but Gamefreak producer, Junichi Masuda made it explicitly clear that many of these Pokemon just aren’t going to get in.
“After so many years of developing the Pokemon video games, this was a very difficult decision for me. I’d like to make one thing clear: even if a specific Pokemon is not available in Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield, that does not mean it will not appear in future games… The Galar region offers new Pokemon to encounter, Trainers to battle, and adventures to embark on. We are pouring our hearts into these games, and we hope you will look forward to joining us on this new journey.”
Clearly he put it lightly that not only will every Pokemon not be available in this new game, but it definitely seems like they don’t want to add the +800 Pokemon through any updates of any sort, instead Masuda assures us that “probably” our favorite Pokemon will appear in the next game. Which sounds obviously bad because you’re pushing features on the next game before Sword and Shield even releases.
So how did this happen?
Well from an interview with GameFreak and Famitsu, we can see some very interesting information that seems troubling and definitely won’t stop the controversy. The first thing we can look at is that the models they used previously with Sun and Moon were “future proof” So in theory you can easily upscale these models using a program called Citra Nintendo 3DS Emulator and everything seems upscaled for up to 4K with all of the Pokemon in Sun and Moon and everything else.
It’s assumed GameFreak gave their all to make these models high-quality in the first place to be transferred to a Pokemon on the Switch. By the way Ultra Sun and Moon had the national pokedex, so you could transfer EVERY Pokemon to the switch in theory from these models.
According to the Reddit post discussing the 3DS models and animations. When they went to transfer models and move animations into Sword and Shield, they didn’t transfer over correctly, forcing them to rebuild them from scratch…
This does not sound good at all. I imagine why nobody would want to say this information to the public, but this sounds really bad. Was there really no other files lying around? Did they really actually just delete their future-proof work? Well I suppose they did, since this is obviously the reason that GameFreak can’t put every Pokemon in the game.
Are there too many Pokemon?
Okay, so they lost the models. That’s still bad but there’s no way that this isn’t salvageable. So apparently they can’t rip the models any other way than just rebuilding them from scratch. With that being said is it possible to make animations for every single Pokemon from scratch? Yes but obviously this will take some time. GameFreak is probably aware of the release date for November 15, which is when they generally release these games. So maybe making better high-quality models for their new Pokemon would take high priority over the previous. So maybe in a way they’ve figure that it’s physically impossible for the employees working on the game, around 70, to create all of these upscaled models of the previous pokemon. There are around 807 Pokemon, so it definitely seems like it would be a pain to re-create them from scratch.
Dynamax the Problem?
So a lot of people can blame that Dynamaxing Pokemon would be a problem. Game Freak themselves mention that Dynamaxing doesn’t simply upscale a Pokemon model by 10, the team has to make a separate model and animations for the Dynamaxed Pokemon which is applied to all of the Pokemon in the game.
Is Dynamaxing the real problem? Well given the situation, it is easy to blame the new feature for replacing the cool EX moves we had in Sun and Moon, but Dynamaxing is probably a feature that might play an important role in the game. I imagine that Game Freak would prioritize the Pokemon for the current-gen for Dynamaxing and they probably have a set amount of pokemon planned for the remainder in the game. So the feature will probably stay.
What can be done?
Well what can be done about the situation? Well first we can say that we can do nothing. That’s right, nothing. It would seem that this Pokemon game’s fate has been sealed and that the set amount of Pokemon being added to the Galar region has already been decided. Aside from that, I would probably suggest to GameFreak to simply delay the game.
They already said that their models were lost due to a simple transfer process, so fans would probably prefer to wait for them to remake all of the models. It does sound a lot better than saying that they aren’t trying to add all of the Pokemon into this game. I am very sure that fans of the series will wait for Sun and Moon’s progress, even if it is for catching all of the Pokemon. Well unless Masuda makes an announcement to the public, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Conclusion
In the end, we might have to settle things and just accept everything as it is. With everything going on and with GameFreak being fully aware of how bad the situation is, I think that they know what they’re doing with the Pokemon game and maybe we’ll get an Ultra Sword and Shield which will give us all of the Pokemon that we want.
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