Last week, Nintendo and Game Freak surprised many when they revealed three different Pokemon titles coming to the Nintendo Switch. The first was the game Pokemon Quest, which is an odd Minecraft-like title with more Pokemon elements. The “core” Pokemon title that was announced last year was revealed to be coming late next year. And as for this year, we’re getting a duo of titles in the forms of Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee.
The announcement itself was met with a bit of controversy by fans, especially when the game was revealed to be a fusion of the core RPGs and Pokemon GO. However, in a Q&A session, Game Freak head Junichi Masuda noted that this was his intention from the start with Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee.
So the first thing I can say is that… I’ve been the director on the main series Pokémon RPGs – most of them, up until now – and there are a lot of kind of core tenets or rules of the series that I’ve never broke up until now, for example the whole idea of the flow of going into a battle against wild Pokémon, reducing their health and then catching them. That was one of the things that we just never wanted to change but, with these games specifically, I wanted to create a new experience for kids and with this time I decided to shift that towards more of a kind of casual, lighter experience.
For him, one of the biggest reasons to make the game was to bring all types of Pokemon gamers together:
What I really want to do with these games is prevent both of these types of players from going in different directions, and I’m hoping that these games will kind of bring them together.
Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee arrives on November 16th.
