Pokémon Sword & Shield: 5 Confirmed Details (And 5 Predictions)

They were always going to be back, realistically, but it’s nice to have it officially confirmed nonetheless. The trailer shows a battle with a wild Pikachu, showing that even after all these years, the electric mouse is still very much the face of the franchise. The hype for the upcoming Ryan Reynolds led Detective Pikachu will only have solidified that, too.

Pokémon GO is a great game, free to play and still going strong since it’s massive launch in the summer of 2016. Since then, they’ve added tons of new features like gym battles, Legendary raids, Mythical quests, trading, lucky Pokémon... the list goes on. One thing they’ve never added though (and are unlikely to) are wild battles.

There’s a good reason for this; GO set out to be a different, less fighting, more collectathon style game. Let’s GO!, a remake of Yellow with PoGo mechanics, also ditched the wild battles too. It was a little strange to see such a huge feature absent, but it was also understandable as it was supposed to offer a bridge between the fanbase.

Sword and Shield offers no such compromise. Wild battles are an essential part of main series Pokémon games, and so they shall remain.