This year, The Pokémon Company took the unusual step of announcing today’s Pokémon Presents nearly two months in advance, way back on May 28. Usually revealed to be happening with just a few days notice, this peculiar two-month run-up suggested that big things could be in store. Oh my goodness, was that ever not the case.
As the 24-minute pre-recorded stream went out today, I watched in growing disbelief. Forget “could have been an email,” this Presents could have been a text message. “We’re adding a few new Pokémon to old games, and there’s a generic-looking puzzle game for kids.” That was the sum total of new information delivered, unless the information you’d been craving about this October’s Pokémon Legends: Z-A were the first names of about three characters.
Things didn’t start out well, with a bizarrely amateurish video promoting this year’s Pokémon World Championships, accompanied by what looked like camcorder footage of 2024's finals and a guy mumbling about how he hoped we’d come along. Traditionally, Nintendo and Pokémon like to open these videos with something, a fun tease or a cute reveal. But given the entire thing didn’t have a single piece of something to offer, it couldn’t appear there either.
There was a brief moment of happiness where we got to see a bunch of clips from the adorable stop-motion Netflix show Pokémon Concierge, which has new episodes coming on September 4, before jumping over to UK stop-motion studio Aardman (they behind Wallace & Gromit) who have a new show with the astonishing name The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu. A brief clip was shown that absolutely did not deliver.
But this was all as nothing compared to the cheek-chewingly awkward section on PokéPark Kanto, an as-yet unbuilt new section of some Japanese theme park that’s going to be Pokémon-themed. This included the excruciating moment in which Junichi Masuda, chief creative fellow of The Pokémon Company, told us how this would be a place “where Pokémon truly exist” accompanied by—I kid you not—shots of tiny plastic Pokémon on crappy little models, and then, somehow worse, plastic figures just plonked down in some random woodland. Oh my god. Also, I cannot get over how Masuda was shown looking ever-further away from the camera every time he appeared.
It was then time to move on to a montage of old games receiving new Pokémon, which would usually appear after a couple of nice surprises, rather than someone putting some plastic figures on a table top and saying it’s a theme park. But then it was time for THE BIG NEW POKEMON GAME REVEAL!
Pokémon Friends is...a generic-looking puzzle game, the sort that’s usually dressed up as “improve your brain” nonsense, just a bunch of sliding tiles and sokoban games. And I swear to you, this genuinely was the only new reveal for the entire Presents.
Rather than in any way acknowledging that there’s no new mainline Pokémon game this year, instead we were told about yet more nothingness for the three-year-old Scarlet and Violet games, a chance to get shiny versions of a couple of monsters in raids, and voiceover informing us that it runs better on Switch 2. We also got another quick glimpse at the turn-based strategy game Pokémon Champions, announced back in February, but not due until some point in 2026. And then it was the big event: a bunch of things we already knew about Pokémon Legends: Z-A. Beyond the names of a couple of characters, the only actually new piece of information was that there was to be a Mega Dragonite. And oh dear god it’s some unholy monstrosity that should have been put down at birth.
And then it was done. A two-month pre-announced event that felt like it had been thrown together by a kid who realized their project deadline was tomorrow. Just the most “Uh, shit, what have we got in the office we can use?” energy.
Surely there’s something they’ve held back about Z-A that we don’t know yet, some twist or innovative concept they could have mentioned? And who gave clearance on dedicating a full two minutes to a theme park that’s presumably currently a building site, doesn’t open until next year, and isn’t relevant to 95 percent of people watching? There wasn’t even a 3D CAD model of the thing to look at! I wish I could have been there to watch the team of people who had to lug some fiberglass Pokémon out to the nearest woods and film them, presumably all just looking at one another in bemusement over why they’d been asked to do this deeply mad thing.
I want to be generous and think that back in May, The Pokémon Company had convinced itself that it would be ready by now to make some early reveal of Gen X and next year’s new mainline Pokémon game. Maybe the folks there thought they’d have a 10th-generation monster they could show us, or even just some elusive trailer revealing the new region. Sure, it’d be early, given the game likely won’t be out before October 2026, but it’d make some sense of why they’d bothered to organize the Presents in the first place.
Because what we got instead was the video streaming equivalent of a sweating executive saying, “Er, the reason I brought you all here today is...” and then pointing out the window and faking a heart attack.
It does make me worry about Pokémon overall. Missing the big game this year might have made sense, given how clearly overworked Game Freak were three years ago when Legends was a spring release, and Scarlet and Violet came out in the fall. But you’d imagine they’d want to let us know big things were coming? And where were the awesome new oddities? Pokémon Friends ain’t it. Instead, it all felt like just sticking a couple of new monsters in a handful of old games, and hoping they’d get away with describing old information about Z-A as “news.”
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