Pokémon announces Switch remakes, open-world "pre-makes," all the e-makes you could want

Big news in the world of Pocket Monsters today, as The Pokémon Company announced ambitious new plans for its long-running pet-war franchise. As with, like, all video game news these days, the big announcements were largely backwards looking, albeit in an ambitious sort of way, as the partially-Nintendo-owned company announced that it’ll be releasing Switch remakes of 2006's Pokémon Diamond and Pearl later this year. That’s pretty standard practice—almost every generation of Pokémon games has gotten some kind of updated re-release at this point, so Diamond and Pearl were due—except for the other game TPC just announced: An open-world exploration game titled Pokémon Legends: Arceus, which looks far more ambitious than anything the series has tried before.

For a franchise that’s branched into almost every genre of gaming imaginable—rogue-like dungeon crawlers, pinball, picross, photography games, and more—there’s never been a Pokémon game that just let you run around the world in 3D action, chucking Pokéballs at your soon-to-be Bidoof. (Although it does look like, if your monsters get near some other monsters in Legends, some more traditional Pokémon battling is likely to break out.) And, again, if this “pre-make”—whatever the Koffing Snorlax that might be—is a little too new-fangled for you, you can always dip back to Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, and re-live your Sinnoh-region based childhoods all over again. Really, we can’t wait to hear what amazing musical odysseys these new games inspire Post Malone to lazily write parody songs about 25 years from now.

Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are out later this year; Legends: Arceus will reportedly arrive in early 2022.