If you've spent the last 20+ years collecting 'em all in Pokemon and were excited about the prospect of Pokemon Home allowing you to transfer your entire collection to the first mainline Pokemon Switch game - Pokemon Sword and Shield - then unfortunately, we've got bad news: you can't. The developers cite "balance and development concerns" for Pokemon Sword and Shield despite it being possible with Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon on Nintendo 3DS. If you're confused, let us explain further.
In a Pokemon Direct shortly before E3 2019, Nintendo announced Pokemon Home; a cloud-based storage system for all of your Pokemon, accessible on iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch. It's completely possible to take some of your Pokemon from Ruby & Sapphire (physical) or Red, Blue & Yellow (Virtual Console) all the way through to Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon. From there, players were expecting to use Pokemon Home to take from Pokemon Bank and transfer them to Pokemon Sword and Shield, but Game Freak has since revealed this won't be possible. More importantly, it won't ever be possible again.
The clip below, from the this year's E3 Nintendo Treehouse, is the moment Junichi Masuda explained it live:
In the clip, the translator repeats Masuda's statement in English: "What this means for Pokemon Sword and Shield is that players will be able to transfer their Pokemon from Pokemon Home, only if they appear in the Galar region Pokedex." So while this is confirmed officially on the Nintendo stream, the reality could be much worse.
Over on 4chan (we know, but bear with us), one anonymous user more directly translated Masuda's words from during the Nintendo Treehouse: "Because of this, from this game forward, our policy will change. The Pokemon that will appear will be specially selected to fit the stage of adventure."
Take this with a grain of salt of course, but Google Translate tells us a roughly similar thing, and nobody has disputed the translation that we can find. What this means for the future of Pokemon is that each subsequent mainline Pokemon game will have a pool of monsters, cherry picked by Game Freak, and the overall number of Pokemon is constantly increasing. We're currently at 800+ Pokemon in total, but without knowing how many new monsters Sword and Shield will introduce, we could easily be at 1000+ by the time the ninth generation rolls around.
If your favourite Pokemon doesn't get chosen to feature in Sword and Shield then tough luck. There's seemingly very little you can do about it. Don't get lucky with the next games (Pokemon Catapult and Trebuchet anyone?) either and your Pokemon will simply be stuck in Pokemon Home limbo, unable to progress any further.
The news about it not being possible on Pokemon Sword and Shield is bad, but unfortunately the truth is so much worse. It would no doubt be a huge undertaking to get 800+ unique Pokemon future-proofed for the next few generations, but it seems like a necessary task to keep the Pokemon fan base happy. It's an... interesting design decision to announce the paid-for Pokemon Home service then reveal it won't be that useful for the upcoming games. Fingers crossed Game Freak revisit their policy in the near future and update Pokemon Sword and Shield later down the line.
Gloss