When Pokémon Sword and Shield were released, fans mourned the loss of access to their Pokémon left in the game’s Bank cloud storage system. But with the release of the Pokémon Company’s 2020 follow up Wednesday, Pokémon Home, most of your pocket monsters from Bank are back.
Excited fans have already begun cracking jokes and making memes about Home’s character Grand Oak and the similarity of his appearance to Dr. Emmett Brown from Back To the Future.
“Who designed this man, I cannot believe, #PokemonHome,” one user tweeted with a 30 Rock meme of Steve Buscemi saying “How do you do fellow kids,” edited to include elements of Grand Oak’s character design.
Fans have also taken note of some illustrations of much-loved Pokémon that are also included with Pokémon Home.
“I’m going to scream this background for your stickers in Pokémon home is destroying my heart,” one user wrote.
Pokémon Home is available for the Nintendo Switch and mobile, but trades can only occur in the mobile app.
Home functions much in the same way Bank did: Players can upload their caught Pokémon from the previous storage system to be used in more recent games. Bank replaced the previous Transporter system in 2014 to allow transference of Pokémon between fifth-generation games Black and White, Black and White 2, and sixth-generation games X and Y, and Omega Ruby and Sapphire.
While players are transitioning between Pokémon Bank and Home, The Pokémon Company has made Bank free until March 12, for users to move their monsters Home, according to the Verge. Home holds double the number of Pokémon Bank— 6,000—and support for Pokémon Go! is forthcoming.
Pokémon Home subscriptions start at $2.99 a month, $4.99 for three months, and a yearly $15.99. According to Forbes, a Premium subscription allows users to do different types of trades, such as Room Trades. In a Room Trade, up to 20 people enter a “room,” choose the Pokémon you would like to trade and receive a surprise Pokémon in return. This is similar to another type of trade supported by Home, the Wonderbox trade, where users can blindly trade a Pokémon on their own.
There are some things to consider when moving Pokémon between games using the Home system. Once a Pokémon is transferred to a game, it can’t be moved back, and any Pokémon transferred into Sword and Shield have to already exist in the Galar region Pokédex. Once the Sword and Shield DLC expansions are released later this year, around 200 new Pokémon will be added to the Galar Pokédex.
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