GameCentral reflects on the current state of Pokémon games, why they’re so rigid in design, and why Game Freak and Nintendo have no incentive to change course.
Pokémon may have seemed to peak during the 90s, when it was still new, but in 2026 the franchise is bigger than it’s ever been. It has transcended beyond just a video game series and can be felt practically everywhere.
Famous musicians like Katy Perry and Post Malone have released collaborative singles; The Natural History Museum sold Pokémon themed merchandise; there are official Lego sets; it was on the cover of Time Magazine and saw a celebrity filled Super Bowl ad; and a dedicated amusement park opened earlier this year in Japan.
Pokémon is on top of the world and the Trading Card Game, in particular, has never been more popular, with one rare cared recently selling for over £12 million. And yet, there’s a sense that the Pokémon video games that started it all have never been in a worse position.
Ever since the series made the jump away from portable-only consoles, with Pokémon Sword and Shield in 2019, every new entry has proven contentious among ardent players, with complaints about gameplay stagnation and technical ineptness.
It’s typically the same complaints too: adding one-time gimmicks that are never built upon, and ditched by the next game, and incredibly low-tech, cheap-looking graphics that hardly befit one of the best-selling video game franchises ever – not to mention one of the biggest media franchises in history.
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That’s not to say the Nintendo Switch era of Pokémon games have been awful, far from it. The core Pokémon formula remains timelessly enjoyable, and, to its credit, developer Game Freak has made an effort to push the series forward in some areas, such as with Pokémon Scarlet & Violet’s open world and Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s real-time combat.
But even with these advancements, none of Pokémon’s Switch endeavours have felt at all revolutionary, taking baby steps forward while keeping their feet planted firmly in the past. There’s also still a sense of compromise and/or unwillingness to truly take advantage of the hardware, with everything looking like a mid-budget indie game.
This is especially apparent when compared to the Switch entries for other major Nintendo IPs like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, which are delightfully imaginative playgrounds bursting with ideas and also extremely technically competent – especially something like Zelda, which has a similar open world structure.
We’re not going to say Pokémon needs saving (the series makes far too much money to be in any sort of financial trouble), but the mainline games are overdue a rethink. The series is yet to have its Breath Of The Wild moment and so the answer may be to treat it like other prestigious Nintendo franchises and not release new games so frequently.
There should only be one mainline Pokémon game per generation
Mainline Pokémon games come out on a regular basis, usually every three years (this has become somewhat muddled by Nintendo insisting that the Pokémon Legends titles are mainline entries, but most fans don’t think of them that way). However, most other Nintendo franchises only get one or two entries per console generation.
Every Nintendo home console has typically only had one 3D Mario game but, with one exception, they’re all regarded as some of the best platformers ever made. Do you think Super Mario Odyssey would be as good as it is if Nintendo insisted on releasing it on the Wii U, just three years after Super Mario 3D World?
After all, a big reason why Super Mario Sunshine on the GameCube is the black sheep of the family is because it had such a rushed development.
The same goes for modern Zelda games. Tears Of The Kingdom launched six years after Breath Of The Wild, but if the development team only had three to work with, the new Ultrahand and building mechanics most certainly would never have been included, even if time was saved by reusing the same map and other assets.
Limiting new Pokémon games to one per console means more time to cultivate more innovative ideas, as well as improving the graphics. The Pokémon games are some of the worst looking first party titles on Switch, but Beast Of Reincarnation, which is also made by Pokémon developer Game Freak, looks really good on PlayStation 5 and PC – proving that Game Freak does have the skill and talent for good-looking games… just not the time.
It’s not as if Pokémon is being hamstrung by hardware constraints either. The original Switch has some gorgeous looking games, and the Switch 2 is capable of running graphically intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
Sure, they can’t run at 60 frames per second but even getting them to run at 30 or 40fps is an impressive achievement considering Nintendo hardware has always been less powerful than Sony’s and Microsoft’s consoles, as seen with the excellent version of Resident Evil Requiem.
But Pokémon doesn’t necessarily even need highly detailed, pseudo-realistic graphics; what it does need is some sense of style and flair. The world of Scarlet & Violet simply looks flat and lifeless, which could’ve have been countered with some stylish presentation and art direction, which Legends: Z-A didn’t really provide.
Capcom’s Monser Hunter Stories 3 – a Pokémon like spin-off that involves raising monsters and pitting them in turn-based battles – has become a recent point of comparison among Nintendo fans thanks to its demo. Aside from boasting lovely cel-shaded visuals, battle animations are far more dynamic than Pokémon’s and, when combined with the camera work, make fights look and feel exciting. And all from a mid-budget game, from a third party company.
Nintendo could certainly afford to inflate the Pokémon games’ development budget. Even if Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s budget, which is far smaller than most modern video games, hadn’t leaked, it’s obvious the Pokémon games have been cheap to make. Not just because of the graphics, but also because of re-used character models and animations (especially for the pokémon) and the lack of voice-acting.
Are there too many pokémon?
There is another major sticking point, though, and that’s the number of pokémon there are nowadays. After nine generations of new additions, there are more than 1,000 pokémon; a frankly ludicrous number that only the most avid fans will memorise in full. Game Freak is keenly aware that managing all of them would be too much of an undertaking, which is why it began cutting them once the series jumped to Switch.
Dubbed Dexit by fans, Sword and Shield was criticised for not having every pokémon available, which meant they not only couldn’t be obtained in-game but also couldn’t be transferred from previous ones; something long-time fans love to do, to hold onto their old favourites.
Frankly, it was a necessity. Aside from being a balancing nightmare for the competitive scene, that’s a lot of character models that need to be made. So, trimming down the number of available pokémon saves a lot of time and means Game Freak can use the inclusion of missing pokémon as a selling point for the DLC expansions.
Game Freak repeated this with Scarlet & Violet and Legends: Z-A, and it can be safely assumed this will happen with the recently announced Pokémon Winds and Waves.
Even with these cuts, there is still a massive number of available pokémon in each game. Not counting DLC, both Sword and Shield and Scarlet and Violet had 400. While Monster Hunter Stories 3 isn’t out yet, the last two games didn’t have anywhere near as many monsters as the Pokémon games.
This is why the pokémon models aren’t as vibrantly animated as the ones in Monster Hunter Stories 3 – making 400 highly detailed models with unique and expressive animations requires too much work, at least if Game Freak and Nintendo want new games out every few years.
The obvious solution is to further trim down how many pokémon are available with each game, but after the Dexit outrage, it is clear fans are accustomed to having a lot of pokémon to choose from when forming teams. And you can’t not introduce new pokémon in each new game as it’s always been a key selling point, so Game Freak and Nintendo are in an unwinnable situation.
A more drastic option would be to cut some pokémon permanently, but that’s likely not something Game Freak and Nintendo are open to considering. Every pokémon is someone’s favourite (even the rubbish ones) and nothing demonstrates the franchise’s unwillingness to ditch any of them than the fact that there are individual 30th anniversary logos featuring every single pokémon ever made.
Game Freak needs to expand
One important detail that needs to be taken into consideration is that despite helming such a massive video game series, Game Freak is a shockingly tiny developer, with only an estimated 200 or so employees. Compare that to GTA 6 developer Rockstar North, which has up to 1,000 employees at its Edinburgh office, according to its LinkedIn page. And that’s in addition to getting help from multiple other Rockstar studios.
This is why many assume that Game Freak is a subsidiary of The Pokémon Company and blame the latter for not financially supporting the former enough, but that’s a misconception. The Pokémon Company is jointly owned by Game Freak and Nintendo, and is primarily responsible for brand management and marketing rather than game development.
Granted, Game Freak isn’t the sole developer on Pokémon games. Take a look at the credits on Scarlet and Violet and you’ll find plenty of external teams Game Freak outsourced work to (which is common now for all triple-A games).
There’s also a separate company called Creatures, Inc., which shares ownership of the franchise alongside Game Freak and Nintendo, that’s responsible for handling the models and animation for the pokémon themselves.
Even so, it’s surprising that Game Freak doesn’t appear to have expanded at all. For such an important franchise, produced on such a punishing time scale, Game Freak is clearly understaffed and its games are given far too small a budget.
Increasingly long development times have become a contentious talking point amongst the gaming community – just look at how infrequently Sony’s first party studios have released brand new PlayStation 5 games – which almost no one considers a good thing.
Earlier this month, Japanese manga artist Noriba made an X post about whether Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest was the more popular role-playing series among youngsters (as translated by Automaton). When they actually asked some kids about it, the answer was Pokémon.
This kickstarted discussions about why this is, but this post offers the best theory: new Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games used to be regular releases, but the gaps have grown so long that kids nowadays aren’t growing enough of an attachment to them. It’s only older generations who grew up playing those games, and who will end up caring about Final Fantasy 17 and Dragon Quest 12.
While a lot of Pokémon’s current marketing is geared towards millennial adults (as evidenced by how the new Lego sets are advertised and priced), Pokémon is and always has been for children. As frustrating as it is for long-time players to sit through the same tutorials each game, every Pokémon game is someone’s first.
New generations of kids are always being introduced to Pokémon from a young age and its steady cadence of releases helps the series maintain a presence in their most formative years, guaranteeing they’ll grow nostalgic for it in their adulthood.
However, Pokémon is more than just the video games now. Between the anime, the card game, and assorted merchandise, it doesn’t just need the games to stay relevant. Plus, Nintendo already partners with other developers to release spin-off games to fill the void in-between the mainline games by Game Freak, such as Bandai Namco’s New Pokémon Snap or the upcoming Pokémon Pokopia from Koei Tecmo.
If the main Pokémon games were to switch to a once-a-console approach, Nintendo can still fall back on those spin-offs to maintain relevancy and interest in the franchise, not to mention DLC spread out over a longer period of time.
Game Freak treats the Pokémon Legends’ titles as mainline entries but given how different they are from the traditional games, perhaps that should be spun out into a separate line-up of games; ones that maintain the shorter development cycles and lower budgets while more time and money is given to the generational ones.
Why Game Freak and Nintendo have no reason to change Pokémon’s development
It’s all well and good saying what Game Freak and Nintendo should be doing to improve the Pokémon games, but it’s extremely unlikely they’ll ever change their way of thinking. There’s a very simple reason for this and it’s one we mentioned earlier: Pokémon makes too much money.
When Scarlet and Violet launched, many players expressed outrage online over how buggy and glitchy it was, even demanding refunds. Did this harm the game’s launch sales? No, it sold a record breaking 10 million copies in just three days according to Nintendo, making it the biggest launch of any Nintendo exclusive.
It’s also the second-best selling Pokémon game ever made (losing out only to the original Pokémon Red and Blue on Game Boy) and the sixth best-selling Switch game at 28.08 million sales. Sword and Shield is right behind it at 27.08 million sales.
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Takato Utsunomiya, chief operating officer at The Pokémon Company, did acknowledge, in 2023, that development environments have changed over the years, but the goal was still to release new products ‘on a fairly fixed kind of a cadence… while making sure that we’re ensuring really quality products are also being introduced.’
And frankly, if the games are still selling tens of millions of units, all that tells Game Freak and Nintendo is that the strategy is working. Why fix what isn’t broken? This also shows that, for how much some fans gripe about the state of modern Pokémon games, they’re still buying them at launch. That or the vast majority of fans simply don’t care and still enjoying the formula regardless of how low-tech the games are.
Perhaps the only thing that would encourage a serious rethink would be if sales seriously slipped. But at this point, that would require a significant competitor. It happened with last year’s Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7, which sold so poorly that Activision openly apologised for it and promised no more back-to-back Modern Warfare or Black Ops games.
The series had already been bleeding players and goodwill for years but not only was Black Ops 7 a bad game on its own, there were two new, better alternatives in Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders.
It’s difficult to imagine this happening with Pokémon, though. While there have been many similar games over the years, not a single one has put a dent in Pokémon’s popularity.
2020’s Temtem made a strong first impression even in early access, but updates ended in 2024 and it’s hardly a household name. Same for Coromon and even Palworld – for all the buzz it got in 2024, as Pokémon with guns, it didn’t steal away enough fans to hurt Scarlet and Violet’s continued sales.
Digimon arguably comes closest to being a viable Pokémon rival, but that was only really in the 90s. It’s still a prominent media franchise and some will point to the recent Digimon Story: Time Stranger – a turn-based role-player where you build parties of Digimon – as a better Pokémon game, but while publisher Bandai Namco seems happy with the one million sales it made in two months, those are not Pokémon numbers.
Combined with how cheap the Pokémon games are to make, that also means they’re guaranteed to turn a profit, barring any kind of mass uprising amongst fans.
How Pokémon Winds and Waves could change the franchise
What’s encouraging about the reveal of Winds and Waves is that it does seem to be addressing most of the points we’ve made. The graphics certainly look like a major step forward (although Scarlet and Violet also looked fairly impressive in pre-launch media) and the 2027 release date is very encouraging.
It may disappoint fans that were hoping for the game this year but it suggests that Game Freak are starting to take their time and that our suggestion of only one or two mainline entries a generation could actually happen.
There’s nothing else that can be discerned about the game at the moment, as there’s no indication what kind of battle system it’ll have or what other new gameplay gimmicks it might introduce (although underwater exploration does seem to be hinted at).
But hopefully the game will mark a new generation of Pokémon in more ways than just adding new pokémon to catch, a new region to explore, and a new battle gimmick that will be discarded by the next game. There’s rumours that Winds and Waves will have more MMO like elements but if it’s still fundamentally the same game Pokémon has been since 1996, we may need to accept that this is what Pokémon will always be.
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