Ultra Sun and Moon Will Be the Last Pokemon RPGs for 3DS

"We’re really treating Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon as the culmination of our work with the 3DS system."

By Joe Skrebels

Pokemon Ultra Sun and Moon will be the "culmination" of series developer Game Freak's work on 3DS, presumably before the core Pokemon RPG series moves to a new home on Nintendo Switch.

Speaking to IGN, Game Freak director Shigeru Ohmori explained that the company has seen each of its 3DS games as the full extent of what could be achieved on the handheld console:

"When we were making Pokemon X and Y, we really were trying to push the 3DS system to its absolute limits - which is what we thought we’d done. But when Sun and Moon came around, we completely redesigned the system, and actually ended up pushing the 3DS even further to what we thought was the most we could draw out of it."

However, that process of improvement seems to have come to an end, with the upshot being that Game Freak will move on after the new games' release on November 17:

"With Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon," explains Ohmori, "we’ve tried to eke that out more and really, really push the system to its absolute limits, and we’re now feeling that perhaps this is the maximum of what we can get out. So we’re really treating Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon as the culmination of our work with the 3DS system."

At E3 this year, The Pokemon Company revealed that a core Pokemon RPG is in development for Switch.

Kazumasa Iwao, director of the latest 3DS games, explains that, at 80 people, the development team for Ultra Sun and Moon is around half the size of Sun and Moon's total staff, and that it was a "comparatively young team".

Iwao and Ohmori wouldn't be drawn on what the remaining staff are now working on, but it can be assumed that much of the rest of the studio is working on the upcoming Switch game.

We know next to nothing about Pokemon's move to the hybrid console, but Pokemon Company CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara has indicated that the development's taking into account better visuals, multiplayer capacity and extra accessories.

We have our own wishes for Pokemon on Switch - five big ones, in fact.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he hopes the Switch game has those creepy photo-realistic Pokemon people sometimes draw. Follow him on Twitter.

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