Pokémon Presents - Pokémon Day 2025 - Pokemon ZA Info & Pokemon Champions Announced

[pika pal]

If that’s the case, I say we go all digital. I used to be on the side of preserving physical media, and for some items I still am. You’re never going to see me put even a dollar towards streaming for TV and movies, for instance. This is my one exception. My main priority above all else as a gaming fan is that games are accessible, and I feel like that and “preserved” don’t quite mean what they used to. People think that keeping physical media around will make older games more accessible but the truth of the matter is, these are objects that age over time regardless of if you “own it” or not. The rise of scalper culture and retailer failures is what ultimately changed my opinion on Physical Vs. Digital. It’s not a perfect solution to lock everything behind subscription services by any means, but it’s unfortunately the most realistic of two evils.

Okay there's one aspect of this that grinds me as incredibly off the mark: Scalper culture and "retailer failures" (as in the retailer is under supplied? Unhelpful? Bad at shipping vs pick up? This is too broad a point to make much of a reply to beyond this) is not going to go away if you shift to all Digital on Video Games. You'll see it happen with other physical components like the consoles, PC parts, accessories, or merchandise like Amiibo.

And bear in mind this is me talking about Scalper culture "in its own right," as opposed to being a reason to advocate for all digital due to thinking it will discourage Leak culture. A large majority of what would be the most complained-about leaks tend to come well before the time frame where broken street dates would be the culprit for information breaking containment. The primary reason Scalping is an issue if anything feels like a consequence of Physical releases becoming a rare luxury for certain titles (see Limited Run Games and their controversial shenanigans with a lot of would-be Digital-Only Indie releases).

 

[bdt2002]

Okay there's one aspect of this that grinds me as incredibly off the mark: Scalper culture and "retailer failures" (as in the retailer is under supplied? Unhelpful? Bad at shipping vs pick up? This is too broad a point to make much of a reply to beyond this) is not going to go away if you shift to all Digital on Video Games. You'll see it happen with other physical components like the consoles, PC parts, accessories, or merchandise like Amiibo.

And bear in mind this is me talking about Scalper culture "in its own right," as opposed to being a reason to advocate for all digital due to thinking it will discourage Leak culture. A large majority of what would be the most complained-about leaks tend to come well before the time frame where broken street dates would be the culprit for information breaking containment. The primary reason Scalping is an issue if anything feels like a consequence of Physical releases becoming a rare luxury for certain titles (see Limited Run Games and their controversial shenanigans with a lot of would-be Digital-Only Indie releases).

When I said “Retail failures”, all I meant by that was the thing someone else said earlier about retailers selling or giving out physical games earlier than they’re supposed to. I apologize for the lack of clarity. You make a good point in some physical releases being as limited as they are, though- we saw exactly what you said happen with Super Mario 3D All-Stars, for one example. I will admit I had not considered that angle. Combating scalpers won’t completely fix the issue of spoilers, I’ll also admit, and an argument can be made that scalpers and spoilers are two separate issues that happen to involve the same form of media in this case.

I may be a filthy dirty leak freak who huffs spoilers like gasoline fumes, but I really don’t think it’s that hard to be considerate of people who aren’t. Unfortunately YouTube is particularly bad for this since spoilers in the thumbnail and title = clicks, and clout-chasers always want to be the first to break the story or seem like they’re in the know.

When my friend groups first started using TikTok that was happening over there for a while too, but it’s not nearly as bad as YouTube. I wish there was some unspoken rule or something to where people could have their videos taken down for posting spoilers too quickly after release or, more preferably, YouTube gave users a choice to hide videos that may have spoilers in the thumbnail or, well, the video itself. W opinion either way, I totally agree on this one.

 

[pika pal]

When my friend groups first started using TikTok that was happening over there for a while too, but it’s not nearly as bad as YouTube. I wish there was some unspoken rule or something to where people could have their videos taken down for posting spoilers too quickly after release or, more preferably, YouTube gave users a choice to hide videos that may have spoilers in the thumbnail or, well, the video itself. W opinion either way, I totally agree on this one.

A function that would serve this but also take a modicum of effort (and thus Youtube will not bother doing) would be the ability to blacklist a topic or term, whether for a duration or "permanently" on a list you can edit.

EX: New Pokemon game is coming out, I tell Youtube to blacklist "Pokemon, Zygarde, Legends ZA, etc" and if their search engine would serve a video based on those words, it in turn will NOT show it to me in favor of something else like, I don't know, Mario Party or a video essay about why Quantum Mechanics prove that Samus Aran is Swedish or something.

Twitter has the ability to blacklist terms or trending tags, and as you'd expect people have used said function for this exact purpose among others when a game they are looking forward to is coming out.

 

[bdt2002]

Quantum Mechanics prove that Samus Aran is Swedish

Bruh I freaking KNEW IT

 

[Perriechu]

I love leak season!!!! It’s fun to see random screenshots and to decipher stats from them and to have content drip fed from egotistical streamers on discord (I’m genuine about this btw I actually like it lol) I also love discussing the datamine and seeing people get excited and speculating it’s FUN

On topic, I am v excited for this game. The influencer(?) videos we’ve gotten are hyping me badddd. I love the fact we can use multiple megas in battle, that’s easily one of the best decisions they’ve made.

 

[AztecCroc]

hopefully they let me have something resembling AZ's hair

Az's ZA hair or his original hair?

A function that would serve this but also take a modicum of effort (and thus Youtube will not bother doing) would be the ability to blacklist a topic or term, whether for a duration or "permanently" on a list you can edit.

Take a modicum of effort and not make their platform objectively worse. They've proven over and over that they'll put in plenty of effort in order to make Youtube worse.

 

[Yung Dramps]

there are literally long hairstyle customization options shown in trailers already, granted all the ones they showed are very girly so I'm probably shit out of luck anyway. hopefully they let me have something resembling AZ's hair

The real elite AZ-related customization pull would be his XY hoodie, getting to wear a normal-sized version of that would make any player look so sick

 

[Frostbiyt]

The real elite AZ-related customization pull would be his XY hoodie, getting to wear a normal-sized version of that would make any player look so sick

Nah, make it full sized so it drags on the ground behind you.

 

[Zowayix]

If that’s the case, I say we go all digital. I used to be on the side of preserving physical media, and for some items I still am. You’re never going to see me put even a dollar towards streaming for TV and movies, for instance. This is my one exception. My main priority above all else as a gaming fan is that games are accessible, and I feel like that and “preserved” don’t quite mean what they used to. People think that keeping physical media around will make older games more accessible but the truth of the matter is, these are objects that age over time regardless of if you “own it” or not. The rise of scalper culture and retailer failures is what ultimately changed my opinion on Physical Vs. Digital. It’s not a perfect solution to lock everything behind subscription services by any means, but it’s unfortunately the most realistic of two evils.

An all-digital future is permanent. Leaks are temporary.

 

[Mario With Lasers]

just so everyone is aware, about a week from now we enter the danger zone

You mean the Fun Zone

 

[Karxrida]

I mean its understandable for people to want to experience something without getting spoiled on anything that happens, it would be very disrespectful to them if say they randomly get reccomended "SUPER SECRET FINAL BOZZZ!!" With a thumbnail that doesnt even try to hide it, its exactly the reason why people mute any discussion of recent games (good examples being deltatune or silksong) just to give people atleast a month before everyone can discuss it openly.

Its just about being considerate really.

Really my only issue with leaks is when they're unmarked. ALL BOSSES SHOWN OFF and then its like a climactic twist boss right in the thumbanil cool great love that. But "ALL BOSSES SHOWN OFF" and the thumbnail is like, a boss already shown off or stage 1 or whatever, that's fine.
Posting about Mega Pecharunt without a spoiler tag on a forum? Bad
Post about Mega Pecharunt under a spoiler tag? Questionable decision to have it here, and sometimes the context of the conversation still leads you to the conclusion, but you at least had decency.
And then there's the people that read leaks and are not even remotely subtle about it in common discussion. Your winking and nudging is just as bad. SV-era felt like it was full of that.


Also, fun thing? This still becomes a problem even if there were no leaks at all. Even without datamining you're still going to see similar things happening. So you're still not solving the problem you're just kicking it down the road a few days! The solution is for people posting these things to have some self control; incidentally there's this one guy who always posts all the music shortly after it becomes available and he always puts the more spoilery tracks behind obfuscated, marked titles, a generic thumbnail and then edits them after a few weeks when more people have beaten and talked about it. It's appreciated!

I may be a filthy dirty leak freak who huffs spoilers like gasoline fumes, but I really don’t think it’s that hard to be considerate of people who aren’t. Unfortunately YouTube is particularly bad for this since spoilers in the thumbnail and title = clicks, and clout-chasers always want to be the first to break the story or seem like they’re in the know.

Fuck ProfasiaGaming. All my homies hate ProfasiaGaming. (He's so infamous even Japan hates him iirc.)

Like. If I ever became a video game developer I would go out of my way to strike the dude's videos or otherwise try to fuck him over.

 

[Eriorguez]

Oh yeah, leaks are neat, clickbaiters without a modicum of decency for spoilers aren't.

I've seen people complain about not spoiling species weeks after the games were released, which is dumb as fuck, but there is a middle ground between that and clickbaiting with not publicly revealed stuff in your thumbnail before street date.

Fuck algorythm-based feeds, they ruined the internet (and the world).

 

[Sulfurian]

An all-digital future is permanent. Leaks are temporary.

The memes of the Nintendo ninjas finding these leakers in their homes are eternal however.

 

[Pikachu315111]

MUCHA LUCHA LIBRE POKEMOOOOON!

MAJOR KUDOS to Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL) for going ALL THE WAY with this Pokemon-theme Lucha Libre event (and of course kudos to Pokemon for sponsoring it)! Like, this is exactly what I envisioned and a little bit more!

Here's a Kotaku article with more info.

 

[CynicalGiant]

mom said it's my turn to be king of france kalos

the uk twitter account posted this blurb about mega chesnaught

"Its hardened armour boasts high defensive capabilities. When Mega Chesnaught moves to attack, this armour becomes a powerful weapon with which to smash opponents."

blurbs don't always mean anything but a mega having stance change or a new variant of it would be so rad

 

[R_N]

mom said it's my turn to be king of france kalos

View attachment 774231

the uk twitter account posted this blurb about mega chesnaught

"Its hardened armour boasts high defensive capabilities. When Mega Chesnaught moves to attack, this armour becomes a powerful weapon with which to smash opponents."

blurbs don't always mean anything but a mega having stance change or a new variant of it would be so rad

You're not the first person to think that but I really think it is purely talking about this attack animation

It is jsut describing a thing it can do. I think if it had something akin to stance change, it would talk about literally changing forms to reflect that.

 

[AztecCroc]

Yeah, if that meant anything mechanically it'd be more likely to be Body Press or a Grass variant than inexplicably giving a non-Aegislash Pokémon Stance Change.

 

[CynicalGiant]

It is jsut describing a thing it can do. I think if it had something akin to stance change, it would talk about literally changing forms to reflect that.

yeah I know it's most likely just a new animation and not a new ability or move but it would be cooler if it wasn't lol

I do want a lot of the new megas to get new moves but unless they change how megas work that's not possible, and giving regular chesnaught a new like gigaton hammer or whatever is very wacky. This mega chesnaught does for whatever reason have like 3-4 new animations specifically, when its not even available in regular play, so champions mega chesnaught is going to look really cool I guess lol.

Yeah, if that meant anything mechanically it'd be more likely to be Body Press or a Grass variant than inexplicably giving a non-Aegislash Pokémon Stance Change.

it already has body press and wood hammer anyway

if anything was going to get king's shield that wasn't aegislash it would be this kingly mega chesnaught, and it had a shield signature move, so that's where most of the thought process for it went.

in terms of vgc as far as I am aware, losing Bulletproof would be a significant downgrade for Chesnaught, since its typing isnt changing, unless its mega ability is either absurd or significantly changes why you would even bring Chesnaught.

 

[bdt2002]

If that’s the case, I say we go all digital. I used to be on the side of preserving physical media, and for some items I still am. You’re never going to see me put even a dollar towards streaming for TV and movies, for instance. This is my one exception. My main priority above all else as a gaming fan is that games are accessible, and I feel like that and “preserved” don’t quite mean what they used to. People think that keeping physical media around will make older games more accessible but the truth of the matter is, these are objects that age over time regardless of if you “own it” or not. The rise of scalper culture and retailer failures is what ultimately changed my opinion on Physical Vs. Digital. It’s not a perfect solution to lock everything behind subscription services by any means, but it’s unfortunately the most realistic of two evils.

It’s not often that I specifically go and double back on an opinion of mine, but this one’s managed to get stuck in my head more than I expected. In regards to previous discussion, physical media I do believe is a net positive over digital for the consumer and anyone wanting to play games for an extended period of time. Going all digital doesn’t fix all of the problems with leaks and spoilers, but I hadn’t considered that going all digital, in a way, might actually make it worse…? Think about it. If someone messes up digital distribution to the point where a game gets out early, that’s a MUCH bigger problem than an individual retailer or three making a mistake like this. I can imagine the PR disasters that would come from that, too, because then the issue goes back to, in this case, Nintendo and who’s running the eShop’s servers and whatnot.

For the future of the industry I do hope physical media is able to stick around and I do hope someone in charge of social media eventually puts out actual spoiler preventing measures. Plus it would really suck if my nephew has to grow up in a time where physical games either cease to exist or are actively discouraged like we’re already seeing with modern consoles just not having disc drives for the most part.

Basically what I’m trying to say with this post is that I’ll take accountability for not fully thinking about my previous take(s) on the subject, though I do still want to see more preventative measures be made for leaks and spoilers for new video games. It’s gotten so bad that I actually started asking myself if Game Freak let the Teraleak happen on purpose or if someone over there were secretly in on the whole thing. (Funny coincidence that a 1 TB+ data leak happens during the generation with Terastalizing, did you notice?) Physical media can stay.

 

[Kitsunine]

Thinking that GameFreak let the teraleak happen is so wildly crazy, I don’t know what to say. On top of just the pure intellectual property damages and strategic information, employees’ names and addresses were released as part of that. Build versions of the games, including this *unreleased* one were included.

It was such a notable corporate security issue, my real life company’s cyber security training uses it as an example of when things go insanely wrong.

Companies want complete control over information releases. Period. That’s how marketing plans work.

 

[bdt2002]

Thinking that GameFreak let the teraleak happen is so wildly crazy, I don’t know what to say. On top of just the pure intellectual property damages and strategic information, employees’ names and addresses were released as part of that. Build versions of the games, including this *unreleased* one were included.

It was such a notable corporate security issue, my real life company’s cyber security training uses it as an example of when things go insanely wrong.

Companies want complete control over information releases. Period. That’s how marketing plans work.

I’m going to be completely honest, I completely forgot about the part where there was personal information in this leak too. That’s on me. I suppose I was (and still am) extremely confused on how something like that can happen so easily. I get that not everything has to be some big conspiracy theory. All I want is for everyone to learn from this (Edit: referring to whoever let this happen). Preferably big leaks in any guise like this would never happen, especially if personally identifiable information is involved.

 

[RoyalDispenser]

Thinking that GameFreak let the teraleak happen is so wildly crazy, I don’t know what to say. On top of just the pure intellectual property damages and strategic information, employees’ names and addresses were released as part of that. Build versions of the games, including this *unreleased* one were included.

It was such a notable corporate security issue, my real life company’s cyber security training uses it as an example of when things go insanely wrong.

Companies want complete control over information releases. Period. That’s how marketing plans work.

All it takes is 1 undertrained employee to click on the wrong email.

Considering what goes on at the war thunder subreddit, its more surprising it hasn't happened sooner to GF with how often they've 'scrubbed' demos and ended up still leaving in the important shit.

I remember ORAS demo they scrubbed out most of the game but the data was still in for it so it told us everything anyways, the only doubt was whether there was anything more cause they didn't leave anything but hoopa unbound unrevealed and glalie/steelix were part of the demos being the last reveals. Sun/Moon I believe had a similar fate, there was a demo iirc and they scrubbed out all the models and forgot the pokedex images in lmao.

Btw; supposedly ZA is now confirmed to be in US warehouses, so leaks could be anytime soon when those warehouses roll out.

 

[pkmfan]

Been playing catch up reading this thread. Some questions.

1) Is the serebii list of confirmed Pokemon currently the most up to date? Likewise for their list of confirmed new/returning megas.

2) I assume all previous generation megas and Gmax are returning, assuming the base Pokemon is in game. I assume some Gmax Pokemon will be missing (anything post gen 6?) but all Megas will return.

3) Sounds like IVs are gone. What other battling mechanic is gone, and what is new?

4) Any new regional variants?

5) Any rough estimate on total number of Pokemon yet? Everything up to Gen 6 (600 or so?), or an even smaller total number like Legends? 200-300?

6) For online PvP, Pokemon Champions seems to confuse me a bit. I know this is a bit off topic, but is Champions meant to be where the future of the turn based online battles will take place? Will future single player games ditch the PvP turn based online modes, with that being left to Champions?

7) I know ZA will have some PvP though I am wondering how involved it will be, something more like a tack on, or is it intended to have a large player base like Scarlet/Violet and previous entries? If so, kind of odd that Champions comes so soon after. I suppose they want to split the turn based fan base from people who want a real time fighting game? Kind of wondering how this will play out, will ZA be a ghost town in 4-5 months whenever Champions is out?

 

[Esserise]

Been playing catch up reading this thread. Some questions.

1) Is the serebii list of confirmed Pokemon currently the most up to date? Likewise for their list of confirmed new/returning megas.

2) I assume all previous generation megas and Gmax are returning, assuming the base Pokemon is in game. I assume some Gmax Pokemon will be missing (anything post gen 6?) but all Megas will return.

3) Sounds like IVs are gone. What other battling mechanic is gone, and what is new?

4) Any new regional variants?

5) Any rough estimate on total number of Pokemon yet? Everything up to Gen 6 (600 or so?), or an even smaller total number like Legends? 200-300?

6) For online PvP, Pokemon Champions seems to confuse me a bit. I know this is a bit off topic, but is Champions meant to be where the future of the turn based online battles will take place? Will future single player games ditch the PvP turn based online modes, with that being left to Champions?

7) I know ZA will have some PvP though I am wondering how involved it will be, something more like a tack on, or is it intended to have a large player base like Scarlet/Violet and previous entries? If so, kind of odd that Champions comes so soon after. I suppose they want to split the turn based fan base from people who want a real time fighting game? Kind of wondering how this will play out, will ZA be a ghost town in 4-5 months whenever Champions is out?

1. Yes

2. We really shouldn’t assume anything about what will ultimately be available in Champions.

3. That’s as much as we know right now, and even in regards to IVs, we don’t yet have a clear picture of what’s changed.

4. None have been revealed.

5. In Champions or in Z-A? Either way we don’t really know yet. The aforementioned list on Serebii is probably as good as it gets right now.

6. There’s no particular reason to believe that the main series games will do away with turn-based battles entirely. I think there’s numerous reasons why that wouldn’t make sense to do even with Champions being a thing.

7. I don’t think even Game Freak can reliably anticipate how appealing people will end up finding Z-A’s combat system, so I doubt they’re making any big plans based on that. Besides, Champions will have various limitations at the start.

 

[CynicalGiant]

6) For online PvP, Pokemon Champions seems to confuse me a bit. I know this is a bit off topic, but is Champions meant to be where the future of the turn based online battles will take place? Will future single player games ditch the PvP turn based online modes, with that being left to Champions?

they haven't said anything definitive afaik but the PVP online ranked will most likely still exist in Gen 10, Champions will be its own thing.