The Pokémon Games Have Had Tremendous Success During The Switch Generation

The weakest ones are the best selling.

You left out "In Spite of Game Freak's Efforts to Hamstring the Franchise With Own Goals", but I suppose that would've made for a cumbersome headline.

So excited for Z-A, especially if it's a launch title for the successor.

Software attachment rates have also boomed in general over the past decade so this makes sense. There are more gamers than ever before and a lot of us are pretty dedicated to our hobbies.

Gives meaning to the phrase: Crap sells don't it.

Quantity over quality. That's why.

It’s not surprising. Most of the complaints you see here for S/V, Shield/SW, etc don’t apply to the majority of the target audience: Children.

@solarwolf07 Doubtful since Switch's successor doesn't release until next year and this game is a SUPER early 2025 title. Also Pokemon games always release last-gen during the first year to 18 months of the new generation so we'll likely see this in early 2025, and another Remake title in the series either this year or next both as current gen titles, after that we'll probably get one more OG Switch Pokemon title before GF moves on.

I really should be more annoyed than I am about Pokemon's status as an unstoppable money printer, but even with all their flaws, I've still enjoyed everything they've put out on the Switch. Plus, I feel like Sun/Moon were the low point of the series, and every game since then has improved on the last, even if they haven't caught up to Gen I-VI yet.

Some of this is an odd comparison, mainly just GBA being last since that only had one Pokemon generation on it where everything else listed had two.

There's so many things about the Switch & Pokemon that were disappointed. SV & SwSh sold amazing despite being mid at best even excluding performance issues, Let's Go & Legends sold much worse despite being much more interesting games, and aside from mobile game ports, the Switch was dead for spin-offs - we got NewSnap which was fun, Rescue Team DX which was good but just a remake, & Pokken DX which is just a port. And a lack of spin-offs just puts more attention on the mainline games, which in this case is not good.

Guilty of having bought most of the switch Pokemon games. And I did enjoy shield. But I didn't like how limited let's go was. I've yet to finish new snap and arceus, but I did enjoy what I played of both. Got bored of shining pearl, and I haven't played Violet for more than twenty minutes because I couldn't get over the visual quality.

I might finally be ready to say that I'm past Pokemon, having played every mainline release since Red and Blue. But it seems that it'll do fine regardless, it still has such a huge player base, and I don't see that changing even if they tank the quality even further.

@Ultimapunch are we talking about Pokemon? Or Zelda?

The best selling but worst reviewed (minus Legends Arceus).

I still have to get scarlet but I’m enjoying this run of pokemon games so far. I still hope let’s go becomes a franchise.

To the surprise of no one, really. Despite all the issues, Pokemon on name brand alone tends to sell well. Even their underperforming titles, still sold gangbusters.

I'll probably get labelled a 'mark' but I enjoyed every single Pokémon game released on Switch. I also think the ScarVi criticism was a tad hyperbolic.

"And that's with another Switch entry to launch in 2025."

...

I have bought several Pokémon games and love playing together with my friends. S/V was a disappointment for several reasons. The online multiplayer was not really co-op, which I was hoping for. And the performance issues... Well let's just keep it at that. But still, I have to admit that the game itself as a single player experience was great, despite the empty world. I had a ton of fun completing the Pokédex.

I just hope that TPC takes the criticism to heart and will improve on the next instalments in the series, but I don't have much hope for it left... Perhaps games like Palworld will have shaken up things a little bit.

"Pokemon Switch sounds like it could fund NASA" - a comment early in the console's life. Guess it could have aged worse.😄

@Pillowpants none of the abundant others in the genre (Digimon, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Yokai Watch, even the progenitor SMT) have shaken things up enough for the franchise to make an audible gulp before. Nintendo even published Yokai Watch beyond Japan.

@Arawn93 I mean, you’re right, children are the target, but…

A proud Dad moment for me was when my children noticed all the jank and cheapness of the latest games without me having to point it out (I want them to believe Game Freak actually cares).

They’d save clips of bugs and just bad animation and show me when I got home from work.

We own all consoles, have hundreds of games, and the latest Pokémon games are the only ones they did this with. 😅

The real kicker for me as a parent of children who love Pokémon is that I have to buy this game TWICE in order for them to catch all the Pokémon.

We are literally doubling their profits, getting ripped off twice, for half assed games that - and breathe…

You get my point.

I'm thinking Nexomon games are better than Pokemon Scarlet / Violet after I played both of them.

@Arawn93 so we just have to ignore the performance, janky gameplay, terrible graphics/textures because it's for kids? GameFreak should never have tried making big open world Pokémon games. Nintendo should have hired a company with experience.

While true, here's to wish luck that the next Pokemon games have better performance. We know the Switch 2 will have upgraded hardware. Shouldn't be hard to get stable performance when the time comes.

I see some people are not thrilled by this news but I think quite a lot of series have found their biggest successes on Switch considering the system has sold tremendously so why wouldn't Pokémon be the same.

@Shade_Koopa The hardware isn’t the issue here; there are countless games of a similar ilk to Pokémon on Switch that look and perform leagues better than most of GameFreak’s efforts. Dragon Quest XI, Ni no Kuni (a PS3 port…), Xenoblade 3…the list goes on. The issue isn’t the hardware but GF not being given enough time to make their games. If that trend continues into the next generation then it doesn’t matter how capable the hardware is, if they don’t have enough dev time the games will always suffer

@Anti-Matter These are on my wish list for a long time, as well as Coromon and Cassette Beasts. I wonder which of those would be best to choose from?

@BookhouseBoy Same, IMO I feel like people are.
almost faulting the series for whatever its not doing.

LGPE was faulted for not being ambitious despite running perfectly fine and polished.

S/V have made Pokemon Open World with more choice and ways to progress. Then people are faulting it for not running at 60 FPS despite literally dozens of mons, buildings an NPCs on screen at times, which is an obvious trade of for more ambitious design.

@larryisaman Pretty much this.

I've said plenty of times that the jump from the handhelds to HD was really gonna showcase GF not being able to just drop out Pokemon games at a rapid pace like the GB, GBA and DS, 3DS handhelds.

Also with consoles means bigger games and those take time especially when debugging.

They underestimated the console type Pokemon games. But amazingly pokemon fans don't care and will buy regardless

@liljmoore I don't really get why you thought that, even for handhelds Pokemon never tried to hit the cutting edge. It was always very simple graphically.

It was never going to turn AAA for consoles.

Arceus is my favourite on switch.

Scarlet is great but let down by a glitchy, buggt, graphical mess. I started a new save yhis week and its so buggy its really hard to continue.

That's very sad.
Don't get me wrong, I love Pokémon, but the ones on the Switch are easily the lowest quality out there. Now that they are selling well, people are signaling to them that they don't need to try.

New Pokémon Snap, however, was a delight.

I bought the Pokémon ?????? and ???????? Dual pack for the switch, first pokermon games I’ve bought also the last. Still have never played a propermon game properly never will but I did my part to continue gamefreaks never ending nightmare.

@Chopper25 Just because you don’t like the new style doesn’t mean they are the weakest in the series. People complained about Skyward Sword being to linear, so they changed it to open world. Now people want the linearity back. People just want what they don’t have, just as Eiji Aonuma said in the IGN interview

@Dr_Lugae Completely agree. I feel like no one talked about how LGPE was the best looking Pokémon game. Why would it need to be ambitious when it's a remake?

Scar/Vi was let down by outdated hardware in my opinion. If TPC could have made a better running game, they would have.

@Pillowpants
Nexomon the first game felt like basic Pokemon games with better ability switching and easier way to catch the Legendaries.
Also, there will be Nexomon 3 still in developing and the third Nexomon game will be full 3D Open World style.

@Anti-Matter Thanks! When they're on sale again, I'll get the first one!

Good news imo. I absolutely love the Switch' Pokémon games (except for the Let's Go games). It's extremely difficult to go back to older titles, considering they require ALOT of annoying grinding and had some rather irritating mechanics to cope with too (Z Moves for exemple, or that SOS mechanic).

I still do go back to Black and White and Platinum from time to time tho

This news makes me sad. It signals to Game Freak that they can rush out glitchy games like PKMN Scarlett/Violet and it will sell well. For next mainline PKMN, I will wait for reviews before jumping straight into it.

@ZZalapski You mean "despite Nintendo and TPC pushing Game Freak to release fully 3D games on the same schedule they were making 2D pixel based ones so they can keep releasing new merchandise, cards, and anime".

@WiiWareWave Where was it said it was releasing early 2025? I'm pretty sure all we got was a year and not anything more specific.

Favourite so far on the switch has been Arceus

@Anachronism Couldn't agree more, I really don't get people complaining about graphics (which was never Nintendo thing) in games that are actually very fun, when Sun/Moon were extremely boring. This generation has been SUCH an improvement for the mainline entries, it completely restored my faith in the series future.

@liljmoore Yeah, it’s honestly crazy that they went from mainly developing for a handheld around PS2/GameCube level with a 240p screen straight up to Switch which was closer to its current gen counterparts than anything else. Really a huge jump and should have been the start of restructuring how Pokémon games get made…instead we have them developing remakes, new generations, spin offs and DLC all within Game Freak and at a fairly rapid pace. ILCA developing BDSP is a step in the right direction but even then it looks like they were given very little time to make it.

If they sell great whether the quality is there or not though why change what isn’t broken…I really wish Nintendo had acquired Game Freak back in the day assuming that option would have been viable. I think if the franchise was under their control alone we’d see a much greater focus on quality than we have now

@shoeses Let's Go was a more interesting game? I mean, it was higher quality and less buggy than ScVi, BDSP or even SwSh, but as a concept it was probably the most boring main series game ever made. Just yet another Kanto revisit, but with less battling and bad motion controls in an era everyone was sick of them. ScVi at least had a unique concept.

Legends on the other hand was the most interesting game this gen, hands down.

Hope they are micromanaged by HAL, otherwise not looking forward to the possibility of getting games with QA issues that could creep up on gollum and skull island rise of kong.

BDSP to me are still perfect Poekemon experiences. Could they have been better if they were based on Platinum? Yes but not by much. Overall i had the most fun with Shining Pearl playing a Pokemon game since the original Pearl.

@KoiTenchi Which Robot Master is in your pfp?

@larryisaman You're right. BD/SP development only began in March of 2020. https://twitter.com/Lewchube/status/1507259142272077842?t=ICNW7qE-uqYdTahaCWdtMQ&s=19
The concept art for the remakes indicates that ILCA wanted to make a more ambitious overhaul of Diamond and Pearl as well; evidently, they had so little time to build the game, especially in a new engine for Pokemon, that they had to make something far more 1-to-1. (In fact, if I remember correctly, there were a few mods made for the DS games that people were able to directly copy the code over for, meaning some of the original code was itself copied and pasted into Unity.) Hopefully with the establishment of Pokemon Works between ILCA and The Pokemon Company, they form a more enduring partnership and get the time they need for their next Pokemon project.

Honestly I thought The Pokémon games on the switch were pretty good. SW/SH sowed the seeds for open world with the wild area, BDSP were cute remakes, Arceus shook up things up with the ability to catch Pokémon without battling. And SC/VI finally add open world to the game. Also no matter what people say about the games you gotta admit that the music AND characters are still pretty great. Also the fact you can access your Pokémon storage anywhere is great! No more going to a Pokémon center to switch Pokémon in your team is a absolute game changer!

@Gaymer90 Well, I'll still agree with the complaints about frame rates dropping below 10fps. For me, the graphics debate has always been about whether or not artistic skill can make up for a lack of processing power, and Nintendo's proven time and again that it can. Game Freak is much more of a mixed bag on that front. They had more or less a free pass up through the DS era thanks to maintaining the games' pixel art visuals even after starting to dabble in 3D, and even X/Y were generally solid despite being their first fully 3D modeled games and supporting the 3DS's stereoscopic 3D. With Sun/Moon, along with the games just not being very fun, they apparently needed to strip out the 3D effect just to get them running well and the Z-moves were poorly animated and tedious to watch. Sword/Shield brought the series into HD and started to experiment with open areas, and properly brought wild pokemon into the world map, but once again suffered from poor animation as well as jarringly bad performance issues. Plus, the more traditional routes were painfully basic and linear compared to previous games. For me, those games really were saved by the DLC areas, which were much better designed and more fun to explore than anywhere in the base games. That generation was also the start of a few laughably bad environmental textures slipping into the games, which has been a plague on their public image ever since. Next up we had Arceus, which dramatically improved on the pokemons' animation quality and pushed into even more open and freely explorable areas, but had to cut back on a lot of environmental detail just to keep the games running, followed by Scarlet/Violet which finally went fully open world, integrated the towns with the rest of the world map, and further improved on the character models and animation quality, with the end result being equal parts impressive and embarrassing thanks to some slideshow-tier frame rates and ugly textures on distant objects. From all this, my takeaway is that Game Freak has kept pushing each new mainline game to be bigger and more modern than the last without taking the time to let their technical skills catch up with their ambition. Their games still have that same creative spark, but they lack either the programming chops or the development time to really polish them until they shine. Now that they've seemingly reached the massive, AAA scale they were aiming for, I hope they'll finally take some time to refine the smaller, more basic details that they've been neglecting.

@larryisaman Oh, I'm aware it's not the hardware's fault. GF didn't optimize the game well at all. But we all know GF can just make a sub-par Pokemon game and it will sell like hotcakes. Hence, why I'm wishing luck the Switch 2 will be enough to RUN the future Pokemon game.

I enjoyed Let's Go and Arceus, but the mainline gen 8 and 9 games are only good but not great. I hope gen 10 is more ambitious.

@Nua Knightman from Mega Man 6.

A favorite of mine since I was a kid.

@WiiWareWave Legends Z-A isn't confirmed for early 2025. In fact, a new rumor is claiming Legends Z-A won't actually release early on in the year, so for all we know, the launch date will be directly related to whenever Nintendo chooses to launch the Switch 2.

@Bret That headline would be even more unwieldy, lol.

@KoiTenchi The design looks awesome, thanks for replying!

I worry for the future of Nintendo gaming if Sw/Sh are the best selling in the franchise, and they use that to direct how they should develop games next.

@YunoboCo mhhh I don't remember that being a problem with ALL the previous Zeldas BEFORE Fujibayashi's era. Only SS, BOTW and TotK have been a problem with fans regarding that "Aonuma logic".

The only example that comes to mind was Wind Waker, and that was because of the art style... not the game's structure.

Certainly there wasn't a problem with AlttP, OoT, MM, LA, TP, WW, Oracles, and aaaalll the Zeldas previous to BotW and SS.

I don't know why it is so hard to admit that TotK was barely a Zelda at all. It may be a good game but it is one of the WEAKEST Zelda games in the series.

Also... Aonuma is just becoming the Rian Johnson of gaming, insulting and blaming fans by trying to make excuses for his own faults and terrible decisions.

Its like the OP said... the weakest ones always sell best on Switch.

Pokemon on Switch? A "success"?

In what universe was it a "success"? What are they on over there at GF/TPCi to think that mindset? It was rightfully mocked and ridiculed as an abject failure.

You'd have to be next-level delusional to think it wasn't an abject, laughable failure. It's time to lay down the hammer of the law and disband GF/TCPi and scatter them to the winds and give Pokemon to Monolith Soft.

@link3710 What 'unique concept' did SV do? 'Open world w/ multiple storylines', something that's been the norm for decades? At least I had to pay attention when playing Let's Go, and it wasn't easy to get stupidly overleveled.

@Dr_Lugae I dont understand how that's what you took from my comment.

I never expected pokemon to change into some AAA type game. I just noted it was gonna be difficult releasing a pokemon game every year like they did with the previous handheld due the games naturally getting bigger

That strategy of giving us a New Gen, remake, spinoff and next Gen in the span of 3 years on one system won't work with a console like the switch without proper development time.

Well technically it did work since they sold big regardless

@Chopper25 and ironically SS, BotW and TotK have been directed by the same person…. Fujibayashi. 😒

He goes to the extremes … either too linear or too open world.

Scarlet and Violet were the best Pokemon games yet in my view. They didn't run the best, and it could have been better. But I think it'll serve as a good base going forward. The freedom of running around in a big open world and searching for pokemon is unparalleled

This is just sad. How will they improve the mfing games if people keep buying them as broken and mediocre as they are?

@Anachronism you brought very good points and you are certainly more knowledgeable of all the little changes that came over time. I'm more of a casual player, and my perspective is simpler: a lot of things made the games more fun and not grindy like it was before. It comes with age I guess, I used to love grinding like crazy on RPGs when I was a kid, and they eliminated this bottleneck on the progression on SwSh, plus the open area was fun, and the game isn't too long, all improvements. SV had bugs that were more funny than annoying in my experience, of course it could be polished, but when you compare to BDSP, what an improvement. I tried to finish the remakes and I just couldn't, and that's cause I absolute loved the artstyle. It's hard to get back to those after experiencing the newest entries. But I mean, it's been upward since Sun/Moon for sure!

@Chopper25 but honestly, he's completely right on that one, the last two games were some of the best reviewed and the best sold of the series by a LARGE margin.

The series reinvents it self all the time, from the sidescrolling of Zelda 2, going 3D and the Ocarina in OoT, the artstyle and free roam in Wind Waker, the masks and time dynamic in Majora's Mask, the open world and soundtrack in BotW, the building and ultrahand in TotK. It got stale for me during the TP and SS, but it certainly got back from it.
Being a Zelda game for me has more to do with the world and characters than linearity, itens and dungeon, and the last 2 were quintessential Zeldas in that aspect.
I feel you, I've suffered when other series changed for what I thought was the worse (Paper Mario, Warcraft after Warcraft 3), but Nintendo has a way of nailing the balance between mainting the soul of an IP and adapting to more modern times. It's gonna be hard to go back now

@shoeses I said nothing about the quality of ScVi (I do love Let's Go for what it is for the record.) All I meant was that ScVi tried something new, for Pokémon. Pokemon's never has and never is going to be doing things never before seen in video games (heck, even Red & Blue weren't the first monster collecting games, Megami Tensei beat them by four years), but at least ScVi tried to combine ideas in a new way.

@Gaymer90 It's funny, I'm actually a big fan of barriers and bottlenecks. The best part of a game for me is when I overcome an obstacle or gain a new ability that opens up the world a bit more. That's one of the reasons I like Scarlet/Violet's open world more than a lot of others. It let's you go off in any direction you want, but there are still paths you have to take before you earn the abilities that let you circumvent them, and you can wander into areas that you're absolutely not prepared for.

A game that's completely open from the start, where you can't get stuck or get in over your head, completely lacks the the progression that makes games fun for me. That's actually one of the biggest improvements I've seen in ToTK over BotW. I'm definitely still in the camp that would rather go back to the more metroidvania-style Zelda formula, but just having some areas I can't reach and enemies I'm not ready to take on makes my progress feel like necessary effort to overcome a challenge rather than just another tick on an endless checklist.