Pokémon Sword and Shield for Nintendo Switch: 10 things we want

Pokémon’s first proper foray onto the Nintendo Switch with Sword and Shield deserves to be a huge adventure that does a lot of stuff you’ve rarely or never seen in the series before.

Pokémon is one of Nintendo’s top franchises, but it’s rarely had entries on Nintendo’s main consoles. The games that have appeared have always been oddball spinoffs, never a fully proper game where you catch the pocket monsters, go on a quest to be the best trainer in the world, etc.

Until this year. It probably helps a lot that the 3DS is in its death throes and the Nintendo Switch is both a home console and a portable system, but regardless of the reasons, the next chapter in the Pokémon saga, two games titled Sword and Shield will be coming to the Switch later this year.

This is by far the most powerful system a Pokémon game has been made for, and hopefully, that will truly be taken advantage of. In what ways? We have come up with 10 that would be great to see. Some of these have been in past entries in the series, but this is also a series that will introduce a good feature in one entry only to drop it entirely in the next, so we hope these are all in the biggest game of the franchise to date:

Multi-trainer parties

Sure, the goal in nearly every Pokémon game is to set out in the world and become a master trainer by defeating a bunch of gym leaders in various cities, but who says you have to make that entire journey alone? Since when? Also most of the time you are a young child, who is letting these kids wander around a whole region by themselves?

A big theme of the entire Pokémon series is friendship. Friendship with your Pokémon, sure, but there’s no reason you can’t make friends during your journey that decide to travel with you and have grand adventures with. There are multiple games that ape the formula of this series in some form and have a full party of three or more people collecting monsters that they all use in battle.

For the biggest adventure in the series to date, it would make a lot of sense to have other fun colorful characters along for the journey that would also help balance out what appears to be yet another silent protagonist and would make battles a much bigger scale as well. They can have their own stories and motivations and reasons for coming along, making a much more fully realized experience.