With the recent announcement of the latest Pokemon Legends: Z-A being announced for a 2025 release, will Pokemon be leaving 2024 without any big game releases? Find out by reading through our best guesses and inferences!

Will a Pokemon Game Come Out in 2024?

No Pokemon For 2024?

Pokemon Day has come and gone, and fans everywhere worldwide were positively shocked at the announcement of Pokemon Legends: Z-A! Labeled as a Pokemon Legends game set in Lumiose City, it will be players' first return to the Generation 6 region of Kalos after over a decade since Pokemon XY’s release in 2023.

However, on the other side of happiness lies the disappointed fans who were hoping for a Gen 5 Black and White Remake. Even we at Game8 were so confident at the prospect of the remakes being announced and released this year that we believed it was all but confirmed.

With Pokemon Legends: Z-A slate for a 2025 release, that now begs the question of whether there will even be a new Pokemon game to be released this year. We can’t count mobile games such as the upcoming Pokemon TCG Pocket, or spin-offs such as the Mystery Dungeon Series(much to my dismay).

Big Pokemon games have been coming out also nearly for over a decade since before the 3DS era. Let’s have a brief look back on a decade’s worth of history in the table below.

We may have cheated a bit with the Sword and Shield and Scarlet and Violet DLCs, but they’re still a sizable amount of content that extends from their main titles. Now, we can see that Pokemon has been churning out nearly yearly releases of big titles, from remakes, sequels, mainline games, to the new Pokemon Legends series since 2010. Their longest streak being from 2016’s Sun and Moon, to 2023’s Scarlet and Violet DLC, spanning nearly 8 years of straight content.

So, what are the chances that this glorious Pokemon Streak ends in 2024? For us at Game8, highly unlikely.

Have Hope, The Year is Still Young!

• [1] Picture taken from tcrf.net

Though the situation might look bleak, 2024 hasn’t even properly started yet as it has only entered its 3rd month. There are still, at most, 9 more months for a Pokemon game to be released. Besides, random Nintendo and Pokemon Directs get announced ALL THE TIME at very unsuspecting days and hours, and so we can only hope for a surprise at any point in the year.

Several mainline Pokemon games have been announced in February, usually during the annual Pokemon Day on the 27th. However, there have been a handful of cases such as Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, and even the Sword and Shield DLC not being revealed during February.

At the end of the day, we can outright infer and somewhat confirm that the Black and White remakes DO exist, because why else would the Pokemon Twitter(X) account tweet gifs of Zekrom and Reshiram out of the blue? Just gleeful and mischievous trolling? If Pokemon were to release any game this 2024, it would HAVE to be the Gen 5 remakes.

Another possible hint to the existence of the Gen 5 remakes would be how, in Pokemon Go’s newest season "World of Wonders," the two month event curiously has the complete set of Gen 5’s Unovan starters and Gen 2’s Johto starters appearing as hemisphere-exclusive for the northern and southern hemisphere exclusively.

This could be nothing, but it certainly adds fuel to the fire of subtle hints of the Gen 5 remakes being on the horizon–perhaps Gen 2 will be coming alongside it as two combined games? Certainly seems Farfetch’d… but maybe…

Source:
tcrf.net Pokemon Black and White Starting Screens
Pokemon Go Season 14 World of Wonders

Clark Jason Kong

Growing up playing all sorts of games, they love playing a little bit of everything, all of the time. Favorites include Counter-Strike, Life is Strange, Final Fantasy, Spiritfarer, and Devil May Cry.