Pokemon

Following the 12 new sets announced last month featuring Smart Brick interactivity, Lego is once again expanding its Pokémon collection with five new sets. They range in price from a $69.99, 757-piece Munchlax to an elaborate $299.99, 2,386-piece Poké Ball that opens to reveal a battle scene and Professor Oak’s laboratory.

If you’re a fan of rugged wearables and pocket monsters you’ll want to mark July 1st in your calendar as the day you can preorder Casio’s new Pokémon-themed G-Shock GA-110 watch through a lottery system on the company’s Japanese online store. It’s priced at ¥33,000, or around $204, and expected to release on July 17th.

Along with announcing when Pokémon Champions will arrive on iOS and Android, The Pokémon Company revealed the signature abilities of Mega Raichu X and Y, which will become playable in Champions after receiving free in-game rewards.

To commemorate the Pokémon franchise’s 30th anniversary, The Pokémon Company is about to drop a special Celebration set that will feature the reprints of rare cards that have long since been out of print and a new style of illustration from Japanese artist YOSHIROTTEN. The set debuts on September 16th.

We’re still a ways out from Pokémon Wind and Waves’s release on the Switch 2 some time next year, but The Pokémon Company has just uploaded a video of the NHK Symphony Orchestra recording the games’ main theme to tide us all over.

In celebration of April Fools Day, Pokopia is running a small, one-day-only event where pokémon will impersonate each other and ask you to figure out who they’re pretending to be.

Pokopia is out this week, and it’s one of the more interesting Pokémon spinoffs, mashing up games like Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and Dragon Quest Builders. If you’re curious just what’s going on in the game, The Verge’s poké-experts Charles Pulliam-Moore and Kallie Plagge will be answering questions at 2PM ET.

As a reminder, now that the stream is over, Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen — remakes of the original games for the GBA — are now available on the Switch.

The battle-focused spinoff Pokémon Champions has a launch date — or a month, at least. The Nintendo Switch version is out in April, while mobile players will have to wait until later in the year.

Sure, you can just pull up digital versions of the Junichi Masuda’s music from Pokémon Red and Blue. Or you can pick up one of the new Game Boy-inspired music players Nintendo is releasing along with 45 different cartridges that seem to play one song each.

As part of the Nintendo Classics line for NSO subscribers, Nintendo is bringing the GameCube cult classic Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness to the Switch 2. There’s no release date, though it’ll be launching some time in March.

The latest Pokémon Presents showcase streams this morning, and given the fact that it also marks the franchise’s 30th anniversary, we’re expecting some good announcements. You can watch it right here.

The machines could be some of the priciest merch released for the franchise’s 30th anniversary. There’s fun details like a Master ball plunger handle and a Meowth balloon that swoops down, but to get all the best features you’ll need to skip the $6,999 Pro and $9,699 Premium machines, and splurge on the $12,999 Limited Edition option.

Toymaker Wow! Stuff has announced a new Pikachu puppet featuring blinking eyes, moving ears, and a “first-of-its-kind animated mouth moving feature.” Pikachu also has sensors that respond to touch with light up cheeks and over 100 sound effects. It will be priced at £89.99, or around $122, according to Insider Gaming.

Yep, Little Saint James had a single Pokéstop until it was removed by Niantic this week after Pokémon Go players kept spoofing their locations to “visit” the island. We don’t know if Epstein himself used it, though emails show he recommended the game to Deepak Chopra and Sheikh Fahad Bin Hamad.

This Super Bowl ad pulls together a grab bag of global celebrities (Lady Gaga, Trevor Noah, Jisoo, Charles Leclerc, Lamine Yamal, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, and Young Miko) to ask which one is their favorite.

While, the latest trailer for Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s upcoming Mega Dimension expansion introduces a new kind of Mega Lucario, the real surprise is that Mewtwo has been added to the game as part of a new side quest that you can play starting today.

The mythical pokémon Zeraora has been almost impossible to obtain in the mainline games since it was first introduced in Ultra Sun / Ultra Moon. But that’s probably going to change next month when the monster’s new Mega Evolved form debuts in Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s Mega Dimension DLC.

There’s a new extended trailer for Pokémon Pokopia showing off more of the monsters you’ll encounter on your cozy island like Professor Tangrowth, Peakychu, and Smearguru. It’s all very cute, but the trailer also makes it clear that these pokémon are living in the wake of some kind of wild catastrophe.

Pokémon Pokopia is a Minecraft-like cozy game in which you play as a “Ditto that has taken the appearance of a human,” learning to build homes, farm crops, and other activities you wouldn’t expect a Ditto to do. If that sounds like your kinda game, it’ll be available on the Switch 2 next year.

Patent and Trademark Office director John A. Squires has ordered the 12,403,397 patent — often oversimplified to “summoning characters and making them fight” — to be reexamined, citing two older Konami and Nintendo applications that raise “a substantial new question of patentability.” This isn’t one of the patents in Nintendo’s ongoing legal battle with Palworld-creator Pocketpair.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A launch day has finally arrived, and if you haven’t checked out our review breaking down how surprisingly good the game is, there’s a new overview trailer out to get you hyped for the new Lumiose City.