It’s Okay To Feel Bad About The Complete, Leaked Pokédex In ‘Pokémon Sword’ And ‘Shield’

'Pokemon Sword' and 'Shield'

Credit: Game Freak

Pokémon Sword and Shield were always going to constitute a change, that we always knew. The two new mainline Pokémon RPGs are the first in the series to launch on a living room console, representing the most striking development yet in Nintendo’s epic merging of its handheld and console libraries. That was the exciting part, but there’s another side to the whole thing, too. These will also be the first titles in series history not to support all available Pokémon, and that has caused something of a stir.

The complete Pokédex for Pokémon Sword and Shield appears to have leaked online in recent days, and while nothing is certain until we actually have the game, there are reasons to believe the leak. And there’s something painful about looking at all those creatures, some of which we have loved for years, that aren’t coming with us to the Galar Region.

The most important thing to know is that it’s okay to feel bad about the decision. It happened to me after I saw the actual list: on an intellectual level I could appreciate the necessity of trimming the Pokédex, and I’m always wary of when hardcore fans turn on their beloved developers. But Pokémon is a series that entirely revolves around breeding emotional attachment to its little characters, and it’s been doing that for more than 20 years. So even while I can understand that yes, something had to change, I’ve been playing with Bulbasaur and Squirtle since I was a child. There’s no way to see their absence in the game and not feel that pang, a loss of continuity that appears to stretch out of the little Pokédex page, through the broader game world and right into my own life.

That’s the core of what’s happening here: you can’t go home again. You, reading this story, have never been closer to death than you are at this very moment. There are times when this or other perpetual childhood adventures can give us respite from that march, and that is why it is inevitably so painful when even Pokémon reveals itself to be part of that real world in which we live. So I get it.

But then there’s the other thing that you have to know about the change, and that’s that it clearly had to happen. Despite endless armchair development about re-used animations, person hours required to make new creatures or whatever, it’s clear on an essential level that the Pokédex could not expand forever. From a developmental, balance, and technical point of view, Game Freak is clear that constant expansion had made the game unwieldy, and that it had become necessary to trim things back. You can possibly disagree on some of those points, but you can’t really disagree on those that relate to the work required for development without actually being on the inside of the process.

Ultimately, I think it will help the series, and not just on a technical level. Even if there exists a universe where it would have been technically possible to incorporate every existing Pokémon in every Pokémon game in perpetuity, I question whether or not that’s actually the right thing for the game either from a competitive or casual point of view. The more Pokémon that remain in a game, the less the new Pokémon start to matter, and the more the entire experience flattens itself out over each new entry. Removing old Pokémon, then, is more about the new ones as it is the old ones.

The old Pokémon aren’t gone, they’re just not with us in the Galar Region. Most or all will be back in some form, in some game. And yet it’s still okay to mourn the loss of this particular vision of the game, the first compromise of its kind. Here’s Daniel Tiger: