Game Freak has stated that Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon will be the “culmination” of their work on Nintendo 3DS.
That saw director Shigeru Ohmori explain that Pokémon X and Pokémon Y, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire, Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon, and now Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon have seen the developer constantly push the Nintendo 3DS hardware. That has now reached its “absolute limits.”
“When we were making Pokémon X and Y, we really were trying to push the 3DS system to its absolute limits – which is what we thought we’d done,” Ohmori explained to IGN. “But when Sun and Moon came around, we completely redesigned the system, and actually ended up pushing the 3DS even further to what we thought was the most we could draw out of it.
“With Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, we’ve tried to eke that out more and really, really push the system to its absolute limits, and we’re now feeling that perhaps this is the maximum of what we can get out. So we’re really treating Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon as the culmination of our work with the 3DS system.”
Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon Kazumasa Iwao added that the development team for the Nintendo 3DS exclusives, which is made up of 80 people, is around half the size that worked on Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon and a “comparatively young team.”
At E3 2017, The Pokemon Company president and CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara revealed that a core Pokemon RPG is in development for Nintendo Switch, which is seen “as a chance to create Pokémon that goes deeper and with a higher level of expression.“.
