Back in February, GameFreak and Nintendo caught everyone off guard by revealing Pokemon Legends: Arceus, an open-world Pokemon game for the Switch that took place in the distant past. Now an insider is claiming that the Pokemon promotional images for the revealed games may give us information on their development status.
Alongside Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Nintendo finally unveiled the remakes of the two Sinnoh Pokemon games, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Pokemon Shining Pearl. All three games got screenshots to show off what they looked like, and Pokemon leaker Kelios believes that you can extrapolate development progress from them.
For instance, while we don’t know when the Sinnoh remakes will come out, Kelios thinks that since it’s supposed to come out this year, these screenshots were taken sometime in January. Arceus’s screenshots apparently came from December. None of the games currently have anything other than a nebulous release window, however, so who knows how long it could take.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus may be the farthest away from release with the Pokemon promotional images. The game is an extreme departure from any other Pokemon game before it, appearing to be truly open-world with plenty of Pokemon to capture and plenty of places to explore.
Nintendo hasn’t given it a release date yet, as the game’s status is “pending”. They may end up giving it an actual release date either later this year or at some point in 2022. But if what Kelios says is true, then it’s likely that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are in the final stages of development, going by the Pokemon promotional screenshots.
Either way, with all of these screenshots out and with three new Pokemon games on the way, hopefully Kelios isn’t too far off in his guess that none of them are very far away from release.