The animations for each move aren’t special and unique. We already have footage of Sword and Shield and they’re nothing special compared to the 3DS games. It’s not this huge leap that makes it seem like “oh yeah I can see why this takes a lot of work.”

Thing is, everyone has a favorite pokemon and as of now they are all up in the air. Mine is groudon. I have a shiny one that I spent eight years finding and now I don’t know if I’ll have to leave it behind, and for me that is a buy-or-not-buy point. Sure, if your favorite has been seen already, you’re in the clear but…

I agree. What makes me even angrier is that they opened pre-orders before revealing this. They should have revealed this fact when they first revealed Pokemon Home.

I agree, it’s not like the animations are ALL THAT. A double kick from Scorbunny still only shoes a stamp of a footprint on top of the other pokemon while your pokemon stays in place, or Goldeen still floating in dirt as if it’s still swimming.

It’s probably going to have 400-500-ish Pokemon, if Sun/Moon are anything to go by. I want to call BS on the balancing issue. It’s not like including on excluding say, Mr. Mime will have a massive impact on the metagame. It also feels shady to me that they opened pre-orders before revealing this information, and that…

Everything else was looking so freaking good. OTHER PLAYERS IN THE OVER WORLD WITH YOU! Actual Multiplayer! Being able to get in over your head. The Raid battles are suitably epic. It all looks so good. Then they announced this, and it completely knocked the wind out of my sails. I understand why they are doing it, I…

Game Freak delayed Pokemon Bank functionality for Sun and Moon by a couple of months. They also made it clear, at the time, that full functionality was coming. This is different. They are clearly saying that not all pokemon will be playable in sword and shield.

So I’ve got about 500-ish Pokemon chilling on Pokemon Sun/bank. Other than checking off local Pokedex entries, I don’t use more than 30-40 of them. I’m not super concerned about the ones that won’t make it.

Game freak doesn’t do patches. They do updated rereleases.

I’d have liked for them to have said that they’re adding Pokemon later. But, unless I glossed over an important part of the video, they didn’t, which is a big source of the confusion/disappointment.

What an incredibly stupid, short-sighted design choice. Do GameFreak not understand that a huge portion of their fan base play to “catch ‘em all”? Why build Pokemon Home to be capable of importing your Pokemon Bank ‘mon, but not allow them to move forward?

Then don't expand the world anymore. Whatever regions and pokemon we've seen, let that be the extent of it. Instead, expand the scope of a single game. Give us multiple regions to explore. Now you have to explore the globe to catch 'em all. 

Honestly, this is a concern of mine as well. With how much they focus on the merch sellers (Riolu has been capturable in every game except for ORAS since he came into existence) it would not be surprised if the Mothims and Huntails of the world fall out of existence.

I feel like Glameow/Purugly was already soft erased.…

That’s actually the unforeseen (but actually predictable in retrospect) consequences of the ill-thought-about Galaxit that passed a while ago. Just wait until we get into the no-deal scenario and watch Kalos completely lose their shit.

“I think the dev team mentioned it would take too long to reanimate every monster.”

I hated that the Sun and Moon games didn’t incorporate a National Pokedex, especially since you could have all pokemon in the game. This is magnitudes worse. If it means scaling back the number of animations per creature or even the graphic fidelity for all the pokemon, I want that trade off. Hell, I’d rather no new…

Maybe with enough fan outcry, but Masuda made this sound like a final decision with no patching or DLC on the horizon.

Right. It makes things really interesting going forward, because the series could find itself at a point where every Gen from 8 onwards is its own island, with Pokemon being removed and added at a whim and no game being compatible with any other. That’s a huge paradigm shift.

I don't like this, but my biggest worry is that they'll soft-erase some Pokemon they don't care about. Not that they'll actually remove them from existence, just that they'll never put then back into games, so you'll never get to use them again. If they make a conscientious effort to make sure each Pokemon is put in a…

That’s a very weird shift. Given the right hardware and games, you could feasibly bring a pokemon that you’ve raised since the GBA games (Or 3ds eshop of gen 1 and 2 if you’re feeling spicy)