The highlights of the Pokémon Company’s full week of announcements
Pokémon Week started small to build up for Pokémon Day, the finale of the week.
Every year on Feb. 27, Pokémon Day is celebrated to honor the day the game franchise started. The celebration is also used to announce future Pokémon projects, but this year was different. Rather than one specific day, the Pokémon Franchise has chosen to create a full week of announcements and celebrations, which has now been called Pokémon Week. With each day before the franchise’s birthday, a new announcement was made, and these are the highlights:
On Feb. 21, Pokémon Masters EX, the mobile game, announced new content for the game, as well as an anniversary celebration. The new content for the mobile game is “Victory Road,” which is now available, featuring a brand-new challenge for players to face to earn up to 5,000 gems as well as the option to choose one sync pair to team up with. The anniversary celebration is the sync pair character “May (Anniversary 2022)” and “Latias,” which will only be available in their featured Poke Fair Scout from Feb. 27 to Mar. 30. Since they are limited, it will be a good way to celebrate both Pokémon Week as well as the mobile game’s two-and-a-half-year anniversary.
On Feb. 24, Pokémon Unite, a game like League of Legends, received its newest addition to the playable roster, Hoopa. Hoopa is a ranged supporter who was made available to unlock at the moment of announcement. This new playable Pokémon will be one of the biggest updates to the game as it will change how it is played both casually and competitively. Hoopa can support its team by setting up teleporters anywhere on the map that both he and his team can use to traverse the map faster or to set up between two goal zones, which will make it easier for the team to support each other. This is huge news as the only supporter being used in high- level competitive play right now is Eldegoss, and this update aims to change the norm of the game and add diversity to how players create strategies to give them an upper hand in the game.
On Feb. 27, Pokémon Day started with a Pokémon Presents. In this 14-minute presentation, news about every large Pokémon title was made. The ones that stand out include Pokémon GO, which is introducing Pokémon of the Alola region; Pokémon Unite, which received a new game mode called full-fury battles as well as a teaser for the next Pokémon to come to the game; Duraludon, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus, which received a new mechanic to the game which introduced massive mass outbreaks, a deviation of the normal mass outbreaks, as well as the addition of more players to challenge in the village training grounds.
Finally, the presentation ended with the biggest announcement yet, the introduction of generation nine. The Pokémon Franchise has shown early gameplay of their newest upcoming games, Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet. People who have watched the presentation believe that this newest region will be based on Spain as there are glimpses of buildings very reminiscent of Spanish buildings like the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. They also showed the first stage of the brand-new starters for the region, Sprigatito the grass cat, Fuecoco the fire crocodile, and Quaxly the duckling. With this, it was announced that these games are slated to be released in late 2022.
Although there was much more announced throughout the entire Pokémon Week, these were the major highlights of everything announced. If you want to see everything for yourself, most of the information is found on both The Official Pokémon YouTube Channel and the official Pokémon Twitter page.
