Pokémon Direct Reveals Pokémon Bank & More Mega Pokémon

[Demelza]

The second edition of Nintendo's Nintendo Direct spin-off, Pokémon Direct, aired earlier this afternoon and brought with it the reveal of Pokémon storage system Pokémon Bank and three more Mega Pokémon.​

Starting off with Pokémon Bank, the service allows Pokémon players to upload Pokémon from their Pokémon X and Pokémon Y games to store, manage and generally look after all the Pokémon you may have ran out of room for in your game. Pokémon Bank will let you store up to 3,000 Pokémon across 100 boxes, which should be more than enough storage. The service is also how we'll be transporting our Pokémon from Pokémon Black, Pokémon White, Pokémon Black 2 and Pokémon White 2 up to Pokémon X and Pokémon Y thanks to a special ad-on for Pokémon Bank called PokéTransporter.

However, it's worth noting that Pokémon Bank won't be free, because the service is here to stay and is intended to work with future games as well as Pokémon X and Pokémon Y, it comes at a cost. Owners will have to pay an annual charge, in Japan the cost will be 500 Yen which works out at about $5. It has been stated that there will be a free trial period after the app is released.

Pokémon Bank will be released through the Nintendo 3DS' eShop on the 27th of December.

Now, many of us will have started our Pokémon adventures with a copy of Pokémon Red or Pokémon Blue and thus being introduced to the world of Pokémon through Kanto and the three starters Charmander, Squirtle and Bulbasaur. For those people today's Pokémon Direct brought with it a very interesting announcement.

Pokémon Direct today revealed that, because we obtain our Kalos starter Pokémon from our friend, the Kalos region Professor will then give us another starter Pokémon, this one being from the selection of Charmander, Squirtle and Bulbasaur. It has also been revealed that once the starters are fully evolved into Charizard, Blastoise and Venusaur, the three will be able to Mega Evolve and their Mega forms can be see in the trailer below. It was also revealed that Pokémon need a strong bond with their trainer in order to Mega Evolve.

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A new Pokémon was also spotted during the Pokémon Direct although it hasn't been officially revealed yet, maybe it'll be revealed in CoroCoro later this month.

If that wasn't enough, it has also been revealed that the special Pokémon X and Pokémon Y themed 3DS XL system that is being released in Japan will also be coming to the US and Europe. However we'll also be treated to a red version of the console for those who aren't keen on the blue. Both will be released on the 27th of September.

 

[Doubled]

*muffled sounds of angry fans, excited fans, and me squealing in the distance*

SERIOUSLY THIS IS SO EXCITING! The thought of not only starting out with one starter, BUT TWO just makes me so happy~ It also makes sense, given that there are four other trainers in the group as well. Two for the main character, then two of each generation for the others~ Its so exciting to think about!

As for the Megas themselves, they make it hard to choose because they all look pretty amazing~ Though this does add a bit of extra thinking to how to form your teams, and if you work about it carefully, you could have 3 starters pretty early on with the event Torchic, and that's power, my friends.

I do wonder about that... thing... though. I have no doubt in my mind that the little white spec in that one screen shot of the new X and Y anime (which I can't find, but most people will know what I'm talking about) at the airport. Most likely, its an alpaca of some sort, but I won't hold my breath, since it looks like some sort of Absol pre-evo.

I do wish that they would have shown us more new Pokemon though. But still, this is exciting, we have little to no idea what to expect when we pick up X and Y, it's going to truly be a new adventure~

 

[Demelza]

I do wish that they would have shown us more new Pokemon though.

I kinda feel the same. While the Mega Pokémon are undoubtedly interesting, I wouldn't have minded some more new Pokémon...plus we can't really count the one we did see because it only shows up for a couple of frames due to poor editing on their part. xD

Not really sure what I think overall. The idea of Pokémon Bank pleases me, and I don't mind paying a yearly fee for something they plan on keeping in place for our future games. I especially don't mind if they keep the price down to £5-10. We all knew that an external app was the only way they'd get around the issues they were having trading Pokémon up from the last generation and I'm honestly quite pleased with the nifty idea they've come up with for it.

All that said...the best part of the Direct for me was when they revealed we could have one of our Kanto starters from the professor. The news shouldn't have made me anywhere near as happy as it did, yet I couldn't stop smiling at the idea of getting to take a Charmander on my Kalos adventures and Mega Charizard looks awesome to say the least. ♥ Fennekin is officially ditched now though, kinda feel sorry for it....

 

[Psycho Monkey]

sg,jtahdgagjjgshhmdh

This is so awesome! ♥

Charizard has the coolest looking Mega Form of the three but the other two are still great in their own right. I'm choosing Squirtle because up until 2007 Blastoise was my favorite starter and I don't see a Chimchar option anywhere yet.

I'm really disappointed with the Pokemon Bank though. While I love the concept and the fact that it can be used with future games, I do not like the annual cost. I prefer to pay a flat rate for games or apps like the Dream Radar and then it's mine for life. Paying $5 a year just isn't worth it to me. Yeah it's cheap and all but it gets to a point where one day I'll be paying for a service I don't use anymore or only ever used for Poke Transfer. I'd rather pay $10-15 up front and not have to worry about it again. If there are any Pokemon missing from Gen VI that could only be gotten from Gen V, I'll just have to trade with someone who is willing to pay an annual fee.

 

[Carmen Lopez]

Considering how dodgy Dream World and other online Pokèmon play has been up to now, I'll gladly pay for something that will (hopefully) be high quality and here to stay. All the other Pokèmon storage games/apps either outright suck or become obsolete with the following generations. So yeah, Pokèmon Bank is probably the best news I've heard about the games so far.

As for the mega versions of the Kanto starters? I think they look awesome, but... I don't like the Kanto starters enough to get too excited and the nostalgia factor isn't there for me personally. I'm holding out still for mega forms for the starters of other generations. (Mega Infernape? Yes, please.)

 

[Doctor Oak]

The price of Pokemon Bank in Japan is 500 Yen - which works out at about $5/£4 - a year. Which is a pretty small amount really. It will also be free for over a month after it launches this Christmas (hopefully that's worldwide, but only Japan's coughing up info for now), so you can transfer your Pokemon from Gen V to VI completely free of charge if you don't wish to use Pokemon Bank at all after that month.

As for why there's a charge at all, I can tell you very, very much that it is for server costs. And that it's almost certainly not operating at even close to breaking even at the paltry sum they're asking for. Under the assumption that they'll be either using Amazon itself, or a service that's at least competitively priced with Amazon, you're not only paying for the bandwidth or storage space used, but each and every individual request to it. With Pokemon, that's a huge number in potential and, believe me, when you start hitting those figures, this does not come cheap.

For context, recently I was the developer on the digital side of the sponsorship of two prime time TV shows by a UK supermarket, and for the ability to respond under heavy load (similar to what Pokemon would experience) at peak times (when the sites were advertised during said TV shows), we used Amazon's cloud servers for hosting. We were serving 'only' a few hundred thousand in those peak times (at launch, Pokemon Bank could reasonably expect to be hammered with millions of requests from around the world), and settling out at a few thousand per hour in other times. The cost for what we used on Amazon's servers during two 6-8 week periods was in the millions of pounds. We had extremelylight websites developed specifically for the purpose of surviving under heavy load (before we confirmed the use of Amazon's scalable cloud servers), so - not dissimilar to Pokemon Bank, really - a lot of that was literally just down to the number of requests.

The fact is, at the sum that's being requested for this service, even in the numbers it would likely attract, will almost certainly still be making this service operate at a loss. However, you'll find it's a lot easier to get your bosses to sign off on making less of a loss than a total loss - especially if you're running one of the most lucrative franchises in the world and can make up some of the shortfall elsewhere.

 

[OshawottIsAwesome1]

I'm going to choose Fennikin and Squirtle!




I usually choose water types, but I don't really like Froakie that much.