"I'm almost entirely convinced that Pokemon Sword and Shield were planned to be 3DS games, and I have some evidence that I feel backs up my speculation."

The main thing that really has me convinced of all this is Pokemon Stars.Around the time Sun and Moon were released, Eurogamer reported that GameFreak was working on converting them to run on the Nintendo Switch. Eurogamer also reported that the Nintendo NX would be a handheld system with cartridge based games you could connect to a television. Needless to say they were well trusted at the time. There was also an HD model of Pikipek which was- possibly accidentally- revealed in early promotional material for Sun and Moon. If something about that slim colored outline and brushed cel shading looks familiar, then I congratulate you for recognizing the technique used for rendering Pokemon in the new games. Edit: I'm being told this is just what models look like in Maya. Oops!You've probably noticed that Sun and Moon didn't come to the Switch. Well, Eurogamer was curious about that too. They reportedly asked some of their sources about this, and the apparent reasoning was that Nintendo didn't feel the need for a Pokemon game in the first year after the success of Zelda and the oncoming hit that Mario Odyssey turned out to be. It had seemed that Pokemon Stars was a 'contingency' to boost the sales of the system if the Switch needed such a boost. It makes sense to me, people buy Pokemon, and the prospect of putting Alola on the Switch was something people were excited about even leading up to E3 2017. It seemed Nintendo didn't want to take that risk of backlash from porting an older game. But I think things get more complicated than that.Let's consider the stance of the president of The Pokemon Company. In an interview with Business Insider, he explained that he'd been adamant the Nintendo Switch would fail since he felt it would not be able to compete with free cell phone games considering it's $300 price tag.I told Nintendo that Switch wouldn't be a success before it went on sale, because I thought that in the age of the smartphone no one would carry around a game console.And to be fair, this wasn't an uncommon bit of speculation leading up to the Switch's launch. A lot of people (Myself included) didn't have much faith. So if you're in charge of this multi billion dollar brand, and you're pretty sure Nintendo's next console is going to do as poorly as their last one- the Wii U- are you really going to put the next big installment out for a tiny consumer base? Are you really going to risk all your new monster designs and characters being seen by a few million people instead of the 3DS, a system closing in on seventy million?Now let's read an interview with Ohmori and Masuda.Two quotes stand out to me here.Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee! were our first full Pokémon game projects that we developed on the Nintendo Switch, and it was almost sort of a research project for us to learn how to develop on that system. We did learn a lot that we were able to use.with Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield, we began the conceptual phase immediately after development wrapped up on Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon. That concept phase took about a year, and then we moved on to full production.What follows this is speculation, I'll be clear about that. I believe that leadership at The Pokemon Company told GameFreak, either directly or otherwise, that they'd be making 3DS games for a long time to come since Nintendo's new handheld would probably fail. While I don't think there are necessarily any .cia files at GameFreak of a 3DS game in Galar, I do think the planning was done for a game that could run on the 3DS. I believe they planned what assets would be needed (Including the infamous N64 tree,) which maps would look what way, which Pokemon would be available, how the gyms would work, I'm convinced that everything was planned to be able to run on the 3DS in case the Switch bombed. I also think the overworld Pokemon were part of this plan. This really isn't a feature the 3DS wasn't capable of, Dragon Quest VIII demonstrates this pretty well, and all the walking and overworld animations existed in Pokemon Sun and Moon's data. Speaking of that, I think most of us agree that the models in Pokemon Sword and Shield are very similar or identical to those in Sun and Moon. Digital Foundry seems to agree that the 3DS models and animations are reused, while the ones in Let's Go seemed to be new- remember, Ohmori considers that the first full Switch game.I think that idea was the secondary purpose of Pokemon Stars. While planning this hypothetical 3DS game, The Pokemon Company had the foresight to tell GameFreak that they need to figure out how to get a 3DS game running on the Switch to be prepared for the possibility of the Switch being a big hit. A lot more things make sense when you consider these games a port: The small map size, the limited right stick usage, the unusual glitches involving special use of Switch hardware, the assets that don't seem on par with games like Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, a lot of it makes more sense. It doesn't seem like a fully developed Switch game because it's not a fully developed Switch game. It's a conversion of a 3DS game we never got.Again this could be totally untrue. They could have been picturing the Switch every second they were planning this game, but I can't help be a lot more forgiving when I consider the idea that I would have been interested in a conversion of Sun and Moon on the Switch. And as pessimistic as I tend to be, this idea does give me a bit more faith that someday we might get a fully developed Pokemon game on the Switch, something up to the higher standards other games have set. I certainly hope so. via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/33XWRqd