One of the most fan friendly features in the last few years of Pokémon games has been the ability to transfer your Pokémon between games and generations. That’s set to continue with the Pokémon Home service, bringing together the Go generation with the old Pokémon Bank system on 3DS and hooking into the upcoming Pokémon Sword & Shield.
However, there will be limits to this in Sword & Shield, as Gamefreak Producer Junichi Masuda stated in their Nintendo Treehouse stream for the game that you won’t be able to bring all of your old monsters into the game. Pokémon Sword and Shield will only accept transfers of creatures that exist in the game’s Galar region. That might include Pokémon from other games, but it means that a large number of the 819 existing monsters will miss out.
As Masuda explained, it’s a basic problem of needing enough time and manpower to do all of this. Sword & Shield on Switch will be by far and away the most graphically advanced game in the Pokémon series, and so all of the Pokémon need to be made for the game from scratch. At the same time, there’s the continuing problem of making sure that everything is relatively well balanced with so many Pokémon.
Pokémon Sword & Shield as a whole is looking pretty fab. It’s coming out for Switch on 15th November and is a major step forward for the series, with a larger open world design where there’s a mixture of Pokémon roaming the Wild Area, but with the classic randomised encounters and trainer battles to be found there as well.
A new feature for the game is Dynamaxing, which makes Pokémon gigantic. You can call upon this ability once per battle, with the effect lasting for three turns, adding another strategic layer to the game. You’ll also be able to encounter and battle Dynamax Pokémon in the wild, leading to the series’ first four player co-op mode in Dynamax Raid Battles.
Source: YouTube
