2026 will mark the 30th anniversary of the Pokémon franchise, which is a sentence that makes me woefully uncomfortable with my age. Personal insecurities aside, most of the Pokémon community believes this is the perfect year to announce the 10th generation mainline title for the Switch 2. Gen 9, Scarlet and Violet, will have been out for four years by then, and it would give this year’s Pokémon Legends: Z-A a little time to breathe. I’ve never been a big fan of the annualization of Pokémon games, but that’s a topic for another day.
I grew up as a diehard Pokémon fan starting with the GBA titles, but slowly fell off the series over time. Part of that was age, sure, but when I realized there was another monster-catching RPG coming this year that had me feeling all those old sensations of excitement and wonder again, I knew it wasn’t just nostalgia. As a thought experiment, I wondered what Pokémon Gen 10 could do to get me excited for this once beloved series again. The answer was a simple one.
Pokémon needs to be rebooted.
Back to basics
All of the major modern problems with Pokémon can be attributed to bloat. I don’t blame Pokémon for ending up in the situation it finds itself in — it is a victim of its own success at the end of the day. After the original generation, we all loved the fact that the next games not only had a new roster of monsters to catch, but all our old favorites were back. Pokémon is a game about building bonds and becoming attached to your little creatures, so it would be antithetical to the game’s themes to force us to sever our bonds with each game. But 30 years later, the benefits of that system are now heavily outweighed by the drawbacks.
When I say Pokémon needs a reboot, I’m mainly talking about the roster.
As of Gen 9, there are over 1,000 Pokémon. If Gen 10 introduces about as many as each gen tends to, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have 10 times the number of Pokémon we started with. GameFreak has already faced backlash for failing to include all previous Pokémon (or allow them to be transferred) since Sun and Moon, and while newer hardware and the ability to add more as DLC have offered some reprieve, the issue has only gotten worse with time. We all remember the “Dexit” controversy when Sword and Shield came out, right?
A lot of this comes down to the team wanting to push the games further. Transitioning off of handhelds opened up a world of possibilities that GameFreak wanted to take advantage of, but the baggage of the series weighed it down. I won’t handwave all of the Switch-era Pokémon games’ technical issues on there simply being too many Pokémon, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t at least a big contributing factor. What I do feel more comfortable claiming is that Pokémon models and animations did suffer due to the sheer volume the team had to work on.
Gen 10 is the perfect excuse to make a clean break. Cut all the existing Pokémon out and introduce a new, fresh roster of 100-200 Pokémon max. Maybe Pikachu can get a cameo or something, but if one legacy ‘mon gets featured, it just opens a can of worms for everyone else to complain why their favorites can’t show up too. Put all the love and care into a new, tight lineup rather than going for quantity. They could even streamline the type system which has gotten a bit bloated as well.
Pokémon should be constantly innovating (round of applause for resisting the urge to say evolving). I would lose my mind if you told me there was an open world Pokémon game when I was 7. Granted, I would also freak out if you told me there were over 1,000 Pokémon, but we’ve seen how that monkey’s paw finger has curled. The current state of the series’ technical performance is embarrassing enough, but the games themselves are losing some of that magic.
I want to be excited and surprised by what I will find in the tall grass again. I want to feel like I’m really on an adventure with a bunch of new friends I’ve named and built a bond with. Legends came close to giving me that feeling, but recognizing every Pokémon and fighting against technical issues kept it from being as revolutionary as it could’ve been.
Gen 10 has a lot of pressure on it just by the nature of its number and the fact that it likely will come out on the 30th anniversary year of the franchise. That’s on top of the expectations a mainline Pokémon game has to contend with after Scarlet and Violet did major damage to the series’ reputation (though admittedly not reflected in the sales). A radical change like a reboot is a gamble, but it also feels like the perfect excuse to shed the weight of the past and focus on a new future for Pokémon.
