Pokémon Sword and Shield may not be re-using the Pokémon 3DS models after all.
Ever since Game Freak announced they were not bringing in every Pokémon back for Sword and Shield, the game has received heavy criticism. It’s hard to find any topics concerning Sword and Shield that don’t have any comments criticizing the decision not to include the national Pokédex. The most recent Sword and Shield trailer on YouTube has 25 thousand thumbs down.
The Pokémon Company made several attempts to silence fans complaints, though, in the end, they have done very little to make fans less angry.
Last month, Famitsu published an interview with Junichi Masuda and Shigeru Ohmori from Game Freak, though the conversation has been covered before by Nintendo Everything and Siliconera, a Reddit user that goes by BrokenWho shares their own interpretation of the interview.
In an update by BrokenWho, they later admit that a lot of the information they shared in their opening paragraph was reiterated from a Pokémon podcast from Comicbook (episode 10 of the podcast to be specific).
In BrokenWho’s post, Game Freak informed Famitsu that the company needed to rebuild the Pokémon models for Sword and Shield by scratch. It was previously assumed that Sword and Shield were reusing models from the 3DS games. The interview, as detailed in BrokenWho’s post, is meant to explain Game Freak’s reason for not including the National Pokédex in Sword and Shield.
Polygon will later publish a piece that is based on this Reddit post, and quickly other sites would then release their own articles based on BrokenWho’s Reddit post.
Joe Merrick from Serebii will later go on Twitter to prevent the spread of some misinformation. Merrick shared some more details on the Famitsu interview. According to Merrick, the information he shares is based on translations he was given from someone he trusted and who does translations for a living.
According to Merrick’s Tweets, the interview does say that Game Freak had to remake the models from scratch. However, it didn’t specify why or if all the models needed to be remade.
All I did yesterday was provide a correction to what a Reddit post that slightly mistranslated the Famitsu interview. This translation came from one of several translator friends who have helped me on the site for well over a decade and do this for a living, not from Google.
— Joe Merrick (@JoeMerrick) July 14, 2019
However, people have really started to full into the whole confirmation bias and are only believing things that match their belief and then go full ham on those who don’t. That’s not healthy.
People have been attacking me solely for providing the translation for that interview.
The fact I’m getting an endless stream of crap from people based on people using Google Translate in videos or people just not being able to differentiate between providing a translation and making a statement is really disheartening.
The community can be better. Let’s be better
The sage of the National Pokédex controversy in Pokémon Sword and Shield continues, and will probably continue past Sword and Shield’s release date on November 15.
-GAME FREAK has not split their staff in half for Town.
-Despite having 143 full time employees work at Game Freak, there are more who work on the games including freelancers and those at other companies like Creatures Inc who aid in development. For example SM had over 500
— Joe Merrick (@JoeMerrick) July 13, 2019
