The Studio Problem
To understand why Pokemon games are the way they are, you have to understand Game Freak. Founded on April 26, 1989 by Satoshi Tajiri, Ken Sugimori, and Junichi Masuda, the studio has 207 employees as of March 2025. For context, Rockstar Games employs over 2,000. Nintendo as a whole employs over 8,200 people. CD Projekt Red shipped The Witcher 3 with a team of around 1,500. What makes this more striking is that the small team philosophy is not accidental. Former Game Freak director Junichi Masuda told Game Informer that he would work with just 20 employees if he could, arguing that bigger teams create too many cooks in the kitchen and that communication is key to development. That philosophy built the original Red and Blue. It also built Scarlet and Violet. For the first two decades, working small was genuinely impressive. Red and Blue were engineering miracles on the original Game Boy. Gold and Silver famously fit two entire regions into a cartridge that had no business holding them. The studio punched well above its weight for years. The problem is that the franchise outgrew the studio somewhere around Generation 5, and the structure never changed to match. Pokemon Black and White represented the creative peak of what Game Freak could produce within its constraints. A genuine story with moral ambiguity, a rival with an actual ideology, a complete regional Pokedex, and creature designs that divided fans at launch and aged beautifully. N remains one of the most interesting antagonists in any JRPG. It was the moment the series showed it could be something more. And then it wasn't something more. Legends: Arceus, released in 2022, was the most interesting pivot the series had attempted in years. Stripping back the formula, placing the player in a historical version of Sinnoh, and making catching Pokemon feel genuinely dangerous was a bold call. The open areas were sparse and the presentation was rough, but there was a philosophy behind it that felt like the beginning of something. The world reacted accordingly, with fans calling it the freshest the series had felt in over a decade. Then Scarlet and Violet arrived. The ambition was visible and real. A fully open region, three parallel storylines, a genuinely affecting climax that caught many players off guard. But the execution was painful. Pop-in rendering that would draw trees fifty metres in front of you. Frame rates that dropped into the teens in busy areas. A world that looked unfinished in broad daylight. Scarlet and Violet sold approximately 27.2 million copies, making them the second best-selling Pokemon games of all time, which tells you everything about where the commercial incentive sits and nothing about whether that outcome was earned.What Other Studios Have Proved Is Possible
Before building a dream spec, it helps to establish what the industry has already delivered that Pokemon hasn't approached.Red Dead Redemption 2 is the clearest example in modern gaming of a world built with obsessive intentionality. Every NPC has a daily schedule. Weather affects animal behaviour. The ecosystem feels like a place that existed before Arthur Morgan arrived. It is the benchmark for what an open world feels like when environmental design is treated as a discipline in its own right. A Pokemon region built with this approach would feel alive in a way no mainline game has come close to. Imagine a Haunter that genuinely only appears after dark, a Gyarados that behaves like an apex predator in the river systems it controls, a Stantler herd that moves through a forest on a seasonal pattern.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom succeeded not because they were technically the most impressive open worlds, but because every visual and design choice served a coherent philosophy. The art direction communicated rules. The world taught you how to read it. Legends: Arceus showed brief glimpses of this approach and was the most warmly received mainline-adjacent game in years precisely because it committed to a consistent visual and gameplay identity. EPD's approach is a template, not a proprietary secret.
Persona 5 is a turn-based JRPG that became a cultural moment. It did that through investment in character writing, visual identity, and thematic coherence. The story had something to say about institutions and the cost of conformity, and it said it through every design decision from the UI to the music to the dungeon art. Pokemon Black and White showed this ambition was possible within the series framework. It has never been repeated at that level, and it has never been given the writing resources to sustain it across a full game.
The Dream Game — A Design Spec
So what does the game actually look like? Here are the four pillars that would define it.A single, cohesive open region built with genuine geographic logic. Mountain ranges that create weather systems. Coastlines that shape which Pokemon appear and when. Forests with internal ecosystems where predator and prey relationships are visible. Pokemon visible in the environment behave according to their Pokedex entries rather than wandering aimlessly. The world rewards exploration not with map icons but with things worth finding. Legends: Arceus gestured toward this and the response proved the audience was ready for it. The foundation exists. It needs a team with the time and headcount to build it properly.
Persona's commitment to theme, applied to Pokemon's existing framework. The journey still begins with a new trainer leaving home. But the antagonist organisation has a coherent ideology rather than a vague plan for world domination. The rival has a genuine arc that challenges your assumptions, not just your team. The Champion is a character you understand by the time you face them. Black and White proved this was achievable within the series. A dedicated narrative team with a real mandate makes it repeatable rather than accidental.
Quality over quantity. A regional Pokedex of 150 to 200 Pokemon, every one designed with the ecological rigour of the original 151. The original designs had an instinctive logic: Bulbasaur made sense as a creature, Gengar made sense as a ghost, Gyarados made sense as a monster. Modern generations produce brilliant designs alongside ones that feel like they belong to no world in particular. A dedicated creature design team that asks "where does this thing live and what does it eat" before finalising a design would produce a regional Pokedex that feels like a field guide to a real place.
Sixty frames per second. Consistent. On launch day. Scarlet and Violet's performance issues were not a surprise to anyone who watched the trailers. The game shipped in a state that would have generated refund demands and review bombing if it had come from any studio without Pokemon's commercial gravity. The franchise does not need a holiday release window. The merchandise, the cards, the anime — none of it requires the game to arrive in November. The game should ship when it is ready. That single change would do more for the series' reputation than any feature addition.
Why It Has Not Happened Yet
The honest answer is that it does not need to. Scarlet and Violet sold 10 million copies in their first three days, the best launch of any Nintendo game at that point. The market has never punished Game Freak for underdelivering, so the structural incentive to overdeliver has simply never existed. There is also a genuine creative conservatism at the studio that is not without merit. Tajiri and Sugimori built something that worked across three decades, and the instinct to preserve that identity is understandable. Not every departure has been welcomed: Legends: Arceus was critically praised and commercially solid but also divisive among fans who wanted a more traditional structure. But the gap between what Pokemon is as a cultural force and what its games deliver as products is now wide enough that it is becoming part of the franchise's identity in the wrong way. The performance memes are not affectionate anymore. They are a genuine conversation about whether Game Freak is the right vehicle for the IP it holds.What Legends: Z-A Actually Delivered
Pokemon Legends: Z-A launched on October 16, 2025, on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, set within Lumiose City where an urban redevelopment plan shapes the story. It landed a 79/100 average on OpenCritic with 65% of critics recommending it. TechRadar's reviewer gave it 4.5 out of 5 stars, calling it near perfection and praising its story focus as something not seen since the GameCube era titles, while noting that Lumiose City felt repetitive over time and flagging some bugs with the new battle systems. That is a meaningful step forward. A score in the high 70s to mid 80s with genuine critical praise for narrative ambition is not where the series was two years ago. Z-A is evidence that the appetite for a more serious Pokemon game exists and that Game Freak is capable of moving toward it. Whether it is the beginning of a permanent shift or a single good entry in a series that will revert to form with the next mainline release remains to be seen.The Dream Game at a Glance
- World: Geographic and ecological logic — Pokemon that behave like the creatures their Pokedex entries describe, in environments that feel like they predate the player
- Story: Antagonists with coherent ideologies, rivals with genuine arcs, an ending that earns its resolution — Black and White proved this was possible, it just needs to become standard
- Pokedex: 150 to 200 regional Pokemon designed with ecological rigour, quality over generational quantity
- Polish: 60fps on launch day, ships when finished — not when the merchandise calendar says it should
- Sources: Pokemon franchise revenue data | Game Freak employee count | Legends Z-A review, TechRadar | Masuda on team size, Nintendo Everything