As expected, yesterday’s Pokémon press conference did not include news about Pokémon Sword and Shield. However, they still announced a few new games.
The one that interests me the most is a new Detective Pikachu game for the Switch. Now, it’s to my great shame that I still haven’t played Detective Pikachu despite being interested from the moment the first game was revealed, but I still plan to, so I was excited to hear about a sequel.
At least… it’s probably a sequel?
The official Twitter account said the new game will “bring this crime-solving Pikachu to Nintendo Switch” which could be taken to be either a sequel or a port. The Gematsu announcement makes it sound more like a sequel, but the only clear fact is that it will conclude the story, since Detective Pikachu ended on a cliffhanger.
Some fans think this means an entirely new sequel, while others think it will just be an enhanced port with more content to complete the story.
Personally, I think it’s going to be a sequel… because they already did the “enhanced port” thing. The game called Great Detective Pikachu released first in Japan, but it didn’t tell the full story. They followed that with the full version, Detective Pikachu, and released it worldwide.
If they were to pull the same trick again and release yet a third version of Detective Pikachu and say it’s really the full game this time… that wouldn’t be great.
So I think the new Detective Pikachu game is probably a full sequel. It’s also been said that the new game won’t follow the same resolution as the Detective Pikachu movie (which apparently tells a different story rather than directly adapting the game).
Now let’s move on to the weirder announcements.
(It says something when a talking Pikachu solving mysteries isn’t the “weird” part of the news.)
The Pokémon Company also revealed their new mobile game app, Pokémon Sleep! Apparently this will use a new device called the Pokémon Go Plus + to track the player’s sleep and… do something in the game, I guess. Now, even though I’m not a big mobile game, I understand the appeal of Pokémon Go. Right now, I really don’t get Pokémon Sleep at all. But hey, maybe it’s just me.
They also revealed a new mobile Pokémon battling game called Pokémon Masters, and a cloud service app called Pokémon Home that lets you manage your Pokémon across multiple games. (It sounds like the successor to the Pokémon Bank, pretty much.)
In non-game news, the T-shirt service Pokémon Shirts will be coming west to let you create shirts featuring the original 151 Pokémon.
I’m interested in the Detective Pikachu sequel, neutral toward the new mobile games, and still looking forward to Sword and Shield news on June 5. And I might be interested in the T-shirts. We’ll see. How do you feel about yesterday’s Pokémon announcements?
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