Nintendo Switch's Core Pokemon RPG Will Let You Use Your Older Monsters

One of the inherent appeals of the Pokemon series is collecting the eponymous pocket monsters, but moving your Pokemon between games has always been complicated by the fact that the franchise spans multiple generations of hardware. Developer Game Freak has made strides in simplifying this process with the Pokemon Bank service and Poke Transporter tool, allowing players to store all of their monsters in one place and access them across every mainline 3DS Pokemon title.

With the upcoming Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee games for Nintendo Switch, the Pokemon series is once again jumping to new hardware. While the titles support connectivity with Pokemon Go, giving you the ability to transfer certain monsters from the mobile game for the first time, it remains to be seen if you'll be able to carry the Pokemon you capture in Let's Go over to the next Switch Pokemon RPG slated to arrive in 2019. Asked whether Game Freak was looking at allowing Pokemon to move between Let's Go and the next core entry, Pokemon director Junichi Masuda assures that the development team is working to make that possible.

"We're definitely always thinking of that kind of forward-moving functionality, especially since we've introduced Pokemon Bank," Masuda told GameSpot through an interpreter. "Now, up to Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, you're able to store your Pokemon, and we know they're very important to everyone. I mean, obviously, people would be very sad if they couldn't use their Pokemon in a future game. So, it does get complicated when you talk about the details and we're still figuring it out, but we do have plans to find ways to let players use their Pokemon in the next game."

We still know very little about the 2019 Pokemon game, but The Pokemon Company announced it will release in the latter half of that year. Unlike Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee, both of which streamline some of the series' mechanics to make it more accessible to newer and younger players, the 2019 game will be a "core" title more akin to those that released on 3DS, which presumably means that some of the elements that were removed from Let's Go--such as abilities and held items--will return.

Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee launch for Switch on November 16. The pair take the series back to the Kanto region and feature the original 151 Pokemon, but players will be able to get one new creature, Meltan, by linking the titles with Pokemon Go. Here's how you can catch one. We talked with Masuda about a number of other topics, including why Pokemon rivals are much friendlier now and if we'd ever see Pikachu's lost evolution, Gorochu. You can read our hands-on impressions of Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee here.