Pokemon Direct Big Announcement

After a while, Nintendo posted a new Pokémon Direct video. In this video, some information was dropped and a huge announcement was made.

The video kicked off with a brief history of the Pokémon franchise, pointing out that this year is their 20th Anniversary of the original game release. To celebrate this, a brief video was shown to show off the series as a whole and to emphasize the tenets of the franchise: collect, trade and battle.

Then the bomb was dropped: Pokémon Sun and Moon are to release Holiday 2016! Some brief concept art was shown to entice us viewers. There were some vehicles (perhaps indicative of a new way to travel?), some concept artwork of Pikachu and also some buildings (which could be anything). It wasn’t much, but enough to slightly interest fans. One big point that was driven home was the addition of Simplified and Traditional Chinese as language options in the upcoming new games.

The video moved on to talk about the (no available) release of the 3DS Virtual Console versions of Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow. These aren’t just ports, and have a couple new features added to make them relevant. First, you can wirelessly trade and battle (originally only possible via a link cable, which isn’t compatible with the 3DS). Second, you can transfer your captured Pokémon from Red, Blue and Yellow into the Pokémon Bank (once a future update is applied). Pokémon Bank is an app for the 3DS that costs $5 a year and allows you to store Pokémon from any game released since X and Y, therefore allowing a universal way for every game in the future of the franchise to access your collection.

Besides the announcement of Sun and Moon, there wasn’t a lot of exciting information shared in the Direct. That being said, we now have something to look forward to, and we’ll surely get snippets of information over the next few weeks and months. Look forward to all the upcoming Pokémon news!

- Teepu

Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon Site: http://www.pokemon.com/uk/pokemon-video-games/pokemon-sun-and-pokemon-moon/

Pokemon Direct