This morning’s Pokémon Presents event gave a look at a number of updates across its portfolio, including the announcement that the next Pokémon game will skip 2024 altogether. Releasing worldwide in 2025, the curiously titled Pokémon Legends: Z-A also seems to quietly confirm what we’ve been hearing for weeks now: that the Nintendo Switch 2 is coming in 2025.
Announced at the very end of today’s Pokémon Presents, the next console game appears to be a follow-up to 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus, set in the Kalos region of Pokémon X and Y. According to the trailer, Lumiose City looks to be undergoing an urban redevelopment and Nintendo has since confirmed that the game will entirely take place within the city setting.
Pokémon Legends: Z-A, which will be releasing on “Nintendo Switch systems,” will be the first major instance of the series breaking from its annual releases since the launch of Pokémon Sun and Moon in 2016. Since then, the Pokémon Company has released a new installment or DLC to a previously released game every year, culminating in two expansions releasing for 2022’s maligned Pokémon Scarlet and Violet last year, The Teal Mask and The Indigo Disk. Though the Pokémon Company has acknowledged how untenable this cadence of releases has been, it was hard to tell if anything would actually change considering how well its games sold anyways.
This move comes on the heels of a tumultuous time for the series, which despite selling better than ever, have caught a lot of flak for a noticeable dip in quality. Beginning around the time of Pokémon Sword and Shield’s launch in 2019, Game Freak’s major console releases have left players and critics frustrated for a variety of reasons. That frustration reached a breaking point with Scarlet and Violet, which not only suffered from muddied and fuzzy visuals on the years-old Nintendo Switch, but was faced with significant glitches and bugs—some funnier than others—that still mar the game experience to this day.
Game Freak’s annual release schedule since 2016 has been seen by many as any obvious culprit in the matter, leading players to call for the company to break from the cycle in order to make for a healthier game and development cycle. Though it could be likely that Pokémon Legends: Z-A is only skipping 2024 to align with the likely release of the Switch 2 around March 2025, it’s still a welcome move. Now, only time will tell if additional time is exactly what Game Freak needs to produce a more polished and sustainably made title.
