Everyone’s a Collector
Perhaps even more so than monster training and competitive play, Pokémon is universally known for its anime-propagated mantra of “Gotta Catch ‘Em All.” Though you might think that fewer new Pokémon this time around would make for a subpar collector’s experience, you’d only be partially right.
At this stage in the series there are over 700 Pokémon. 700! As fun as it might be for some to experience a full new cast of 150 each generation, if Nintendo were to keep that up it might actually become impossible (or at least hardly worthwhile) to catch ‘em all each and every time. Limiting the number of new ‘mon and filling out the rest of the regional Pokédex with old ones actually ends up being quite effective – it gives you both a sense of discovery in finding new creatures, and an almost parallel universe, deja vu-like feeling when encountering the olds ones.
To further alleviate the stress of tracking and hunting down over 700 elusive critters, Nintendo is introducing something called Pokémon Bank – a 3DS app that will let you store up to 3000 Pokémon in the cloud, and transfer them easily from game to game. It’s basically Bill’s PC on performance enhancing drugs.
Pokémon Bank isn’t out yet, but its compatibility will go all the way back to the original Black and White, and hopefully work with future games as well. If Pokémon Bank can guarantee it will work with all Pokémon games for the foreseeable future, catching them all will become a far more popular pursuit that can be taken on casually, across games. It will become something everyone will at least attempt to try their hand at, which is more than can be said about trying to get all 600-plus in previous games.
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