Your Favorite Pokémon Is Probably Not in Pokémon Sword and Shield
Pokémon: Sword and Shield are just one week from release, and already fans are revolting against the new game. That's not a great look for the video game franchise that nurtured many of us through elementary and middle school.
These are, you may already know, the first full-feature Pokémon games to be made for the Nintendo Switch, after the charming, if limited, Kanto-centric Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee!. As is tradition with the franchise, the new generation of games will introduce an all-new region (welcome to Galar, very loosely based on the United Kingdom this time around), all-new Pokémon (I am in love with Polteageist, a ghost who lives in a teapot) and all-new gameplay mechanics (Gigantamax, which makes your Pokémon kaiju-sized for a limited period during battle). All that sounds fun, but that's not what people are talking about, just days prior to the new flagship games dropping.
Instead, fans are in total uproar over the fact that, for the first time, many iconic Pokémon are set to be excluded from the game. This is unprecedented for the main titles in the series. As of Let's Go, there were 809 Pokémon available for capture, one way or another. Sword and Shield will apparently feature just 400 'mon in the Pokédex, the lowest number fans have seen since 2003. That's after making way for the dozens of new creatures introduced for the games, meaning more than 450 from the previous generations will be entirely unavailable, even if you try to trade them in from other games.
Just one sweeping glance at the Pokémon subreddit tells you a lot about how fans are reacting. The scandal, deemed "Dexit" (honestly, extremely good) by fans has inspired talks of a boycott, and accusations of laziness on the part of Game Freak, the developer of the games.
What does this mean for the average player? Maybe not too much. It's not like the previous generations didn't prioritize their own new monsters anyway, but this is the first time more than half of the existing roster has been excised from the game's very code. One poster visualized "Dexit" in a post, blacking out all the unavailable creatures, and there are some glaring omissions. My favorite son, Wartortle, will be completely unattainable, as will the entire Squirtle evolutionary line. In fact. every single "starter" Pokémon from previous games are gone, save for Charmander, Charmeleon, and Charizard, since that big orange dragon is a de facto mascot for the series and puts money in Nintendo's pocket. I'm relieved to see my big round purple trickster, Gengar, is still in the game, however.
"Dexit" really only scratches the surface of long-lingering problems with the Pokémon franchise though, which long feels like it's outgrown Game Freak's capabilities. The gameplay and graphics themselves have barely evolved in any meaningful way in the past 10 years, and the Switch's far superior hardware is capable of some really gorgeous stuff. In addition, "Gigantamaxing" is just the latest in a series of ill-advised battle gimmicks which fans would gladly sacrifice in order to bring mega evolutions back into the fold: A concept so clean and so brilliant introduced in Pokemon X and Y, then tossed away for no good reason in subsequent releases.
Anyway, Pokémon: Sword and Shield will probably make a dump truck full of cash on November 15 either way, but let this be a warning to those who hoped they'd be able to galavant around Galar with the likes of fan favorites Mareep, or Psyduck, or even Dragonite in tow. They're gone. But, hey, at least we got a Mr. Mime evolution that absolutely no one asked for.
We’re talking the original 151 here, folks.
Originally Appeared on GQ
