Pokemon Sword and Shield Won't Have Full National Pokedex, Locking Some Pokemon Out

In the wake of today's Nintendo Direct, Pokemon's developers took the stage to convey a bunch more information to fans. And unfortunately, not all of it was good.

For the first time since Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, some monsters will be completely unobtainable in the latest version for Switch, Game Freak confirmed. Only Pokemon available in the Galar Pokedex will be able to be transferred to the series via Pokemon Bank.

Nintendo's official reasoning for this was to preserve battle balance. After all, having to design around more than 800 monsters is a lot. Not having to model all of them will probably help as well.

Understandable as this might be though, there's bound to be some disappointment over the monsters that are omitted in the Galar Pokedex. In Ruby and Sapphire, many popular monsters were unavailable, including favorites like Charmander, Gengar, and the Eevee family. The kicker was that they were actually still available on the cartridge, so fans often cheated to get them into their game.

Game Freak's decision will have the effect of partially breaking a lengthy chain that goes all the way back to the Game Boy Advance. At present fans can import monsters from basically every mainline version, including the eShop version of Gen 1 and Gen 2. Now some monsters will be locked out.

We'll see what Nintendo's plan is for Pokemon Sword and Shield going forward. In the meantime, here's hoping Infernape makes the final cut. Pokemon Sword and Shield is out November 15 on Nintendo Switch.