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Editorial
3DSMobiSwitch
Pokemon Bank Is Not Too Big To Fail, And That’s Terrible
The millennials yearn for the return of Pal Park, and other observations on the February 25 shutdown.
Pokemon is about to go through Dexit IV, and this one feels more like a Phantom Menace than a Rocky.
The first Dexit occurred in 2002 when Ruby and Sapphire overhauled Pokemon’s kludgy internal stat system to allow for female Pokemon to have the highest possible attack (among other changes) but also prevented the first two generations from crossing the Color -> Advance barrier. The second one came in 2016, when Sun and Moon did not track a “National Pokedex”, and the third and most infamous came in 2019 when Sword and Shield explicitly prevented about 27% (241 of an eventual 898) Pokemon from ever emigrating to Galar. Including a freaking Smash Bros. character in Greninja – and yet, Blissey remained. But eventually, all but five* Pokemon became permanently obtainable with just Switches, and two of them still have a chance to be available once Scarlet and Violet stop running events.
But the closure of Pokemon Bank means what was once two groups of Pokemon – those that appeared on 20th century hardware and everything else – will now be six. The originals, the GBA and DS, the two different 3DS generations that appeared on cartridges with no movement between them, the Virtual Console rereleases, and the Switch era. This creates a vacuum cleaner: it simultaneously sucks and blows. Because whether through omission or intent, there was never a way to transfer Pokemon from one generation to another on the 3DS that didn’t involve Bank or Pokemon Transporter. At least you had Pal Park in the first generation of DS games and the Poke Transport Lab in the Black / White games.
I still have my original Sapphire starter from 2003, though I think the date got changed along the way. I was able to bring Blair the Blaziken through Bank and then Home to Legends: Z-A, and earlier this year I gave her maximum investment. She’s now level 100, the pinnacle of power for a Pokemon, and I fixed up her effort values and gave her maximum stat potential + a beneficial nature for the moveset. I thought I might do that one more time with the best Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald starter Mudkip and even spent $TILT on replacing copies of Platinum and White 2 a couple of months ago. I guess now I have to speedrun this, alongside a bunch of other potential hunts.
This is what peak 23 year old chicken looks like.
I’ve built up somewhat of a “shiny living Pokedex” in Home – one of every species in its shiny/alternate color variant – and I’d like to stop relying on Pokemon Go to fill in gaps for me. There’s a lot of Pokemon, particularly of the legendary variety, whose recent appearances are “shiny locked”, meaning they have no chance to produce a shiny. This leaves me with a few options: Pokemon Go’s relatively inconsistent raid schedule (Mewtwo doesn’t show up easily raidable for four years then gets three runs in two months), resetting in an older game, or grinding out the Dynamax Adventures in Sword and Shield’s DLC – which takes 10-15 minutes to complete and doesn’t even guarantee me an opportunity to check. I think I’ll take my chances with the old game resets, thanks. But in March 2027? I can reset a wormhole in Ultra Sun all I want to get a shiny Articuno, but if it’s stuck on the 3DS…
I fully understand why Bank is shutting down, though. I did my transfer from Bank to Home on the latter’s opening night, and I don’t think I’ve stored anything since. Plus, there’s a lot of people whose waking dreams manifest in Bank and then get sanitized in HOME after the transfer, and 3DS online services got completely broken just before the eShop died – even if Pokemon wasn’t officially affected, there’s probably some unpatched vulnerabilities in the code of the 3DS games or Bank. Arbitrary code execution? Cool, a less painful way to get shiny Manaphy. REMOTE code execution? Nothing good comes from that.
You’ve probably seen the meme image that compares the target market of Call of Duty and Pokemon: the intention is the Pokemon market is a child and the CoD market a young adult, but the actual result is reversed. I was in the younger adult category, and even now that I turned The Ultimate Answer this past weekend I still hate that I don’t have time to take full advantage of Bank in the six+ months it has left. But Big Pikachu is still targeting the younger market, and 100+m copies of Home-compatible Pokemon games means they can probably take the PR hit. Lord knows if they survived the Scarlet and Violet launch tire fire to the tune of 20+m shipped in six weeks, they can handle anything.
* Victini and Zarude have only been available in time-limited events. Celebi will require the Pokemon Home mobile app to claim, and Walking Wake / Iron Leaves only appear during specific raid events which may become the default ones around the release of Winds and Waves.
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Related Content
- Pokémon Bank [3DS]
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- Pokemon Home Gets Fire Red And Leaf Green Support In October, Loses Bank Access In February
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