Pokemon on Nintendo Switch ?

Pokemon is a game series developed by Game Freak. The concept of the main saga is simple : As a young boy or girl, catch all the pokemon, train them in order to defeat the 8 arenas and the Pokemon League to become the new Master.

Let’s review the two last entries : Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. They don’t bring more features than the two previous ones. In actuality, what has been added are five new Pokemon, a half-hour of new story and a few new moves. In fact, every entry of the Pokemon of the series is like DLC of the previous one but this time fans didn’t accept it well. All the Pokemon games have (almost) the same features with a different form : the few features that has been brought should have existed since the beginning (separation of the Special stat into Special Attack and Special Defense from the 2nd Generation, rework of the Technical Machine from the 5th Generation). Plus there is one more thing : the fact that the Pokemon world has always been a long, linear corridor.

The new Pokemon opus has been leaked and it will be available on the Nintendo Switch. What if it was a brand new arrival in the saga with a lot of new features ?

Let’s see if Pokemon should renew itself and in which ways it can change itself.

Should Pokemon renew itself ? Let’s take a look to the sales of the few last games. Pokemon Sun and Moon made record-breaking sales with 14,5 million games sold between 18 november 2016 and 31 december 2016. In only one month, these sales made Pokemon Sun and Moon the second most sold Nintendo 3ds game. From this point of view, it is hard to understand why Pokemon should renew itself (Especially because every new game has better sales than the previous one).

That’s why it is interesting to make the difference between two types of player, those who play for the strategy aspect and those who play for the story (Let’s call them e-sport players and casual players). In a broad stroke, the e-sport player will play the story because the game forces him to but what concerns him the most is what happens next, breeding pokemon and training them carefully to build the best team possible and play against other players around the world. On the contrary, the casual player will be interested by the story mode and after he finishes it, he will stop playing.

So, the lack of renewal should be affecting the casual player more rather than the e-sport player. Realistically, the strategy already renews itself on it's own, it evolves following the metagame that changes every time there are new pokemon, objects, moves or abilities added.

To support the fact that the Pokemon saga should renew itself, we can compare it with two other big name Nintendo games, Zelda and Mario with Zelda Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey, that, with their release on Switch, more or less broke their own rules and still had a huge success. Zelda Breath of the Wild in particular we see the usual rules of Zelda broken, the exploration system had been totally reworked and the player is pushed to exploration thanks to a smart open world mechanic.

We’ve just seen that Pokemon doesn’t necessarily have to renew itself, let’s see now if Pokemon can renew itself.

From the difference between casual and e-sport players, we have assumed that if Pokemon should renew itself, it should concern more the casual player because the meta already evolves alone. Pokemon already tried to change the turn based combat system (in Pokemon Ranger for exemple) and that has been a failure (once compared to a game of the main saga).

One of the things that Pokemon could change without breaking the essence of the game, just like Zelda Breath of the Wild, is the exploration system by introducing an open world mechanic. Before the Switch, Pokemon and Zelda were similar in the sense that they had a pretty linear world and story.

To make the actual concept of Pokemon match with an open world, it needs to change some features like the pokemon encounter system :

• The player could have access to the whole world but the level of the creatures are not the same everywhere so that the player will have to understand by himself where he is supposed to go and where he is not. (Zelda Breath of the Wild uses this system).

• The level of the wild creatures increase with the level of the player or with the number of badges that he's got. This solution is interesting because the player could train his Pokemon everywhere and whenever he wants to, depending on which area he prefers or which area he hasn’t visited yet. In the current Pokemon games, visiting or revisiting a low-level area with strong pokemon is quite boring because the game becomes not as challenging anymore.

Plus, since Pokemon X and Y, the game tends to be in 3D so why not a real 3D open-world Pokemon game ? Pokemon doesn't have to renew itself but it has an interest in doing so, because after the amazing changes of Zelda and Mario, we can also hope for changes for the betterment of the series.

The images used in this article are only fan-made visuals, there have been at the time of writing no official releases from Nintendo.