When I get into a Pokemon game, I really get into it. But this only happens about once a decade or so because that’s how long it takes the franchise’s infamously incremental approach to innovation to roll up into something that feels like an actual sequel. This time the pattern happened to line up with Pokemon’s big leap to home consoles with Sword and Shield. And that means last time I fell hard for Pokemon was in the New York-inspired DS games Pokemon Black and White from 2011.
But ten years is a long time. I played dozens of hours of Pokemon Black on my launch Nintendo 3DS during my first year of college, a long time ago! I thought I held onto the cartridge all these years later, but when I looked for it following the launch of Pokemon Home I was bummed to discover I didn’t have it anymore. Pokemon Home is Nintendo’s new service for letting you keep your Pokemon friends forever, and it also made me sad for the friends I lost along the way.
I’m jealous if you somehow avoided this dumb drama, but Pokemon Sword and Shield got a fair amount of flack for not including every single Pokemon in its Pokedex. Long-time fans wondered if Pokemon caught in previous generations would just be stranded on old hardware. Pokemon Home promises that won’t be the case.
Depending on what system you’re importing from, whether it’s Pokemon Go on your phone or Pokemon Let’s Go or a 3DS game connected to Pokemon Bank, you’ll have to jump through some hoops to bring them all home. You’ll actually want to pay attention to the new Professor Oak there to guide you. The different pricing options complicate this somewhat. There’s a free version with very limited space or you can pay $16 a year for thousands of slots and features like online training separate from a game. At least Pokemon Bank is free for the month.
Eventually I did bring in as many of my monsters as possible, including some familiar faces from Pokemon X I forgot about. However there are still more issues to be aware of when transferring them forward into a particular game. As we already said, Pokemon Sword and Shield just straight-up don’t support all Pokemon. So my Greninja had to stay in the boxes. Some supported Pokemon may use unsupported moves. So my Hawlucha needs to learn a different Fighting attack to replace Karate Chop. And once a Pokemon moves into the new games, it may be rendered in compatible with old games. Still, awkward implementation aside, being able to bolster my roster with these blasts from the past was pretty satisfying, and makes me excited to see which other monsters will return in the upcoming expansion pass.
The Pokemon Home app is available now on Nintendo Switch as well as iOS and Android. Your quest to catch them all has finally started.
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