By John Ancillotti, Staff Writer
Two new Pokémon games, including the highly anticipated generation four Sinnoh remakes “Pokémon Brilliant Diamond” version and “Pokémon Shining Pearl” version, as well as “Pokémon Legends: Arceus,” were recently announced for the Nintendo Switch.
On Feb. 26, the official Pokémon YouTube channel held a live streamed presentation celebrating Pokémon’s 25th anniversary.
A countdown starting with the most recent Pokémon games, Sword and Shield, lead back to 2007’s Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl.
A Nintendo DS showed footage from the old games, then it switched over to modernized graphics.
“Pokémon Brilliant Diamond” and “Pokémon Shining Pearl” are visually the most similar 3D Pokémon games to the old pixel style, with short chibi models in the overworld.
Takato Utsonomiya, the chief operating officer of the Pokémon Company, said the remakes would be faithful to the original games, which is reflected in the similar art style.
The games are being developed by ILCA, Inc. with the original games’ director, Junichi Masuda, as a director alongside ILCA’s Yuichi Ueda.
The generation four remakes will be released in late 2021.
The reveal trailer was immediately followed by another announcement. “Pokémon Legends: Arceus” takes place in the Sinnoh region long before “Brilliant Diamond” and “Shining Pearl” take place.
The gameplay showed wide open fields, Pokémon battles taking place in the overworld, and the main character throwing pokeballs at wild Pokémon without entering battle.
The gameplay style is similar to “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” which is known for drastically changing the Legend of Zelda formula.
The announcement trailer claimed “the Pokémon series enters a new era…” referring to both the older timeline within the Pokémon universe, as well as the new gameplay style for the series.
The game is being developed in house by Game Freak, the usual developers of main series Pokémon games.
“Pokémon Legends: Arceus” is planned to be released in early 2022.
The beginning of the presentation opened with a five-minute song showing off almost everything Pokémon, from games to merchandise to Pokémon themed vehicles, since the first games released on Feb. 27, 1996.
Tsunekazu Ishihara, the president and CEO of The Pokémon Company, introduced the rest of the presentation.
He then passed the presentation to Utsonomiya who started by introducing a new trailer for the upcoming “New Pokémon Snap” video game coming to Nintendo Switch.
“New Pokémon Snap” is a revival of the 1999 game of the same name. The original game became a cult classic among Pokémon fans. It went 22 years without a sequel.
The long-awaited sequel was revealed mid-2020 and will be released in stores and on the Switch’s Nintendo eShop on April 30.
The new trailer showed off multiple new features of the game, such as ways to make Pokémon react and perform actions to snap better photos and ways the player can edit the photos.
The game also features a fictional ingame social media, where the main character will be posting his or her photography.
The following day Pokémon celebrated its real 25th anniversary with a virtual Post Malone concert experience presented by P25 Music.
The animated rapper performed his music while traveling around the world of Pokémon with the pocket monsters running, flying and swimming around him.
ancilljm19@bonaventure.edu
