The remake is also believed to be an ambitious one. Rather than just being a remaster with higher-resolution textures and widescreen support, the remake will instead be at least on the tier of Dragon Quest 1 and 2 HD-2D Remake, which makes use of visual techniques and technology that was first seen with Octopath Traveller.

In a ResetEra thread discussing the report, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has also thrown in his own thoughts, where he said that the assumption that Square Enix wants to bring back older Dragon Quest games through remakes is a safe one. He also, however, noted that these remakes, including the rumoured Dragon Quest 7: Fragments of the Forgotten Past, will not be as ambitious as the ongoing Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy.

“I think it’s safe to say that Square wants to remake as many DQ games as possible for modern platforms,” posted Schreier. “Doesn’t mean all or any of them are going to be big ambitious revamps like FFVIIR.”

When it comes to the Dragon Quest franchise, Dragon Quest 1 and 2 HD-2D Remake is the next big release in line. The game, slated for an October 30 launch, is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and the Switch 2, and will be priced at $59.99.

There is also a new mainline Dragon Quest game in the works, dubbed Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate. The game was originally announced all the way back in 2021. However, since then, Square Enix has been quiet about the RPG. Back in May, however, director Yuji Horii apologised for not having more concrete news about the status of the title.

“Yes, indeed, I can’t say anything, I apologise,” said Horii when asked about development progress on Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate. “I am making it, putting lots of work into it. I can only say that the next work will be great too, working really hard. Please look forward to it, is the only thing I can say.” In the same interview, Horii also spoke about potentially bringing the sequel to the Switch 2, saying, “Yes, I believe it could be compatible with Switch 2 as well.”

Announced during the Dragon Quest 35th Anniversary special livestream in 2021, Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate is being developed on Unreal Engine 5. While release platforms haven’t been confirmed yet, Square Enix’s recent approach to multi-platform releases would indicate that it is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

It’s the fastest-selling Nintendo console, beating the Nintendo 3DS and outselling the original Switch by over two-to-one. While NielsenIQ didn’t provide sales, it noted that the 3DS sold 113,000 units, and the Switch sold 113,000 in the region.

When compared to the best of Sony and Microsoft, the Nintendo Switch 2 is fourth behind the PS5, PS4, and Xbox Series X/S. Its revenue is also in third behind the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. However, it’s worth the period that this sales data is tracked (Sunday to Saturday) and the number of days the Switch 2 was on sale (two).

While the PS5 also had a two-day sale period in the UK, the Xbox Series X/S was available for five days and the PS4 for seven days. Stay tuned for official announcements on sales in the coming months.

This means that all online services, which includes functionality like friends lists and online multiplayer on the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U will stop working on April 8. Aside from the lack of online services, the platforms will still be usable, and games will remain playable.

It is worth noting that the ability to redownload purchased games and update data will still be available even after the online services have been shut down. Other features, however, like SpotPass, will cease functioning, since it makes use of online communication. The two online services that will still work on the Nintendo 3DS are Pokemon Bank and Poke Transporter.

The Nintendo 3DS will still be able to make use of its StreetPass functionality, since it doesn’t really rely on an Internet connection to work. Interestingly, games that support local multiplayer on the 3DS, like Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, will still retain some semblance of multiplayer functionality. Online multiplayer for most titles, however, will be completely shut down.

While initial reception to these games was more divided than to any other set in the series, over time, fondness for these games has grown too. These games are decidedly different from the rest of the series in some almost intangible ways – from the bold (if controversial) story decisions that Apollo Justice (the first one in this trilogy) makes to some increasingly contrived plotting in the later games, these ones do not feel as cohesive or as tightly written as either the original Ace Attorney trilogy, or The Great Ace Attorney. 

"While initial reception to these games was more divided than to any other set in the series, over time, fondness for these games has grown too. "

That’s not necessarily a bad thing – for one, it means if you don’t like one of these, you have a higher chance of liking the others, which isn’t something you can say about the other two sets of games. It also means that each of the games feels distinct – the characters and their motivations and statuses change across games, the settings change across games, and in fact, since the original games straddled two generations of hardware, we even get a dramatic bump in presentation in the later two games, with a move to surprisingly well realized 3D models, more dramatic camera angles, and full anime cutscenes. The later games bring their own gameplay gimmicks, with the standout being Spirit of Justice’s Divination Seances.

There’s something to be said for the distinct flair of these games – while a lot of fans were originally outraged at how Apollo Justice handles certain characters, for example, it feels refreshingly bold and unconstrained by the framework of the earlier games with a lot of the narrative and character decisions that it makes. Dual Destinies introduces a fascinating new character in Athena (arguably one of the best characters in the series, in fact), and has a sharp, arrestingly compelling narrative that might have some of the best payoffs in the series. Spirit of Justice narratively feels the most redundant and the most contrived, but is flat out the best one to play through, and the Seance mechanics make each case extremely interesting. The lack of cohesion is a knock against these games, don’t get me wrong – but that also comes with its own unique strengths that imbue these games with a flavour the rest of the series is yet to have.

"The unique and distinct character these games have, both narratively and mechanically, makes them well worth experiencing, even with their foibles. "

All three of these games were well worth playing with their original releases, and the final cases in the later games (especially Dual Destinies) are among the best the series has had. Which means that this release of the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy is well worth playing, especially if you are a newer fan who discovered this series later, and never played these games before. The unique and distinct character these games have, both narratively and mechanically, makes them well worth experiencing, even with their foibles. 

If you are a fan of the original releases on DS and 3DS, these are greatly incentivized re-releases. The graphics look great upscaled to full HD, the bonuses such as the art gallery, the music gallery, and the movie gallery are all great for fans to dig in to. There are many other QoL additions as well – a new Story Mode lets you simply get through the narrative if you don’t want to deal with the puzzles and gameplay segments, for example, and numerous UI improvements from the later games were back ported to Apollo Justice as well. The games are even set up to let you jump right into the chapter or case you want from the get go if you just want to replay the greatest hits – no need to go through the whole game just to get to the parts you wanted.

"If you are a fan of the original releases on DS and 3DS, these are greatly incentivized re-releases. The graphics look great upscaled to full HD, the bonuses such as the art gallery, the music gallery, and the movie gallery are all great for fans to dig in to. "

There are some tradeoffs that have had to be made to bring these games to modern hardware though. The original titles, especially the 3DS entries Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice, made some great use of the hardware’s unique dual-screened nature that obviously was not possible to translate as-is to either PC, Xbox, PlayStation, or Switch. And so those gameplay segments are a bit different because none of these systems have two screens. Functionally, it comes out to being roughly the same thing – you still have to keep track of footage and evidence across two independent but correlated displays – but for purists who do care about the authenticity of the original experience, that’s still something to take note of. 

Those tradeoffs aside, the games are brought over pretty much as-is. They are extremely faithful reproductions of titles that have only gotten better with age and with some distance from the circumstances of their original releases. If you liked them then, you’ll like them now. If you didn’t like them then, you may find yourself more receptive to them this time around. And if this is your first time discovering them, then you’re in for a ride either way. 

With the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy, the developer has finally finished bringing over the entirety of the Ace Attorney series to modern platforms, in multiple languages and localizations. These once niche but now iconic games are finally accessible to anyone who may be interested, with all sorts of QoL perks and bonus content celebrating these games included to boot. Getting to go through this series again on modern systems has been great, and has only served as a reminder of the brilliance of the gleefully deranged anime courtroom drama series. All of this is to say, I sincerely hope an Ace Attorney 7 is around the corner. I am glad we got to play these great games again in their best form yet – but rather than whetting my appetite for more, they only served to make it even more ravenous. Hopefully the next major entry in this franchise is coming soon – but until then, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy is a great release for new and old fans of the franchise alike.

This game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

As for the affected platforms, the Wii U Basic and Deluxe, and every 3DS model from the Nintendo 3DS to the New Nintendo 2DS XL are being affected. It’s worth noting that a specific date for the discontinuation of services will be announced later, but if “an event” makes it difficult to operate them, they could end earlier.

Players can still utilize features and modes that don’t require online services, and you can download updates and re-download any content, including DLC, for a period. StreetPass will also continue to function since it relies on local communication between Nintendo 3DS systems, though SpotPass, which uses online services, will not. Stay tuned for a specific date in the coming months.

As of right now, these consoles are the primary consoles PlayStation and Xbox sell; their supply issues, which were protracted and lasted for almost two years, in no small part due to the global supply chain and production disruptions in the havoc wreaked by COVID-19, are beginning to recede. They are, finally, almost thirty months after first being introduced, beginning to get some great, next-gen exclusive titles.

This means that as of right now, these machines are in the full swing of things. Or they should be, but Xbox is struggling, in part due to a lack of supply for the higher end Series X console (which seems to be what the market wants more of, rather than the cheaper, lower end Series S), and in part because Microsoft has thus far failed to make a convincing case to buy the Xbox Series consoles that has resonated with the broader market (this comes down to the lack of must have games, but that is an oft had discussion that this is not the place for).

But the PS5, the PS5 is now finally hitting its stride. As Sony’s flagship console at the moment, it is selling with all the momentum, volume, and pace that a successful PlayStation console in the prime of its life does. We are, finally, past all the caveats of generation transitions, launch shortages, and the COVID disruptions, and we can finally start to assess PS5 sales on their own merits, and ask the obvious question: is PS5 going to outsell PS4 in the long run?

Every company obviously wants every new system to do better than the last one, but that situation is inherently unrealistic – there are only a finite number of customers in the addressable market, and only finite resources. Just because your previous product sold a certain amount does not mean that the follow up will match or exceed it. And, in fact, the games industry is filled with such examples – Nintendo went from 154 million units of the DS sold to 75 million units for 3DS; Sony went from 156 million PS2s, to 80 million PS3s. And, on the flip side, we see reversals in the opposite direction, such as the Switch selling more than 120 million units (and counting), coming right after the Wii U, which sold under 14 million.

Put simply, each console’s sales are ultimately a product of the circumstances and broader market conditions that it finds itself in, and the performance of a predecessor, while certainly instructive, has limited use in informing discussions about how successors or subsequent follow ups might do. In other words, just because the PS4 sold 115 million, it does not necessarily mean the PS5 will do that as well.

There is a reasonable (though not overwhelmingly likely) chance that the PS5 ends up falling short of the PS4’s final tally. If this were to happen, it would come down to a fair few factors – the PS5’s higher entry point will serve as a barrier for the broader mainstream to adopt the console, once the enthusiast rush dies down (the broader mainstream market is what takes a console from being reasonably successful, like the Xbox One or Nintendo 64, to being a 100 million plus massive success, like the PS4 or Nintendo Switch, so it cannot be ignored in this discussion). Especially given the context of the broader global economy, and how it continues to circle the drain with more impending recessions, and runaway inflation, the PS5’s price could end up being more and more prohibitive as the mass market constitutes a larger and larger portion of the system’s sales.

Of course, Sony will by then reduce the price – but by how much? The PS4 never got a major permanent price drop (it went down from $399 to $299 and then stayed there), and in general, it appears the broader strategy across the market right now is to hold console prices to the extent possible, outside of some smaller, limited time promotions or offers. In fact, one could even argue the industry is likelier to increase prices rather than drop them right now – just in the last two years, we saw Nintendo increase the price of the Switch $50 via the OLED model, and we saw Sony go one step further and raise the price of the PS5 by $50 in all markets around the world except the U.S., without revising or updating the hardware.

Assuming, however, that at the very least a PS4-style cadence of price drops and discounts is possible, the PS5’s price should not be a significant deterrent in the long run. It will certainly be a factor for some proportion of its would-be buyers, but on the whole, it shouldn’t factor in as much.

What does factor in is that the PS5 is fighting in a far more crowded field than the PS4 ever did. The PS4’s competition was the Wii U, which is one of the worst selling consoles of all time, and the Xbox One, a console that fumbled its launch so badly, the brand is still trying to recover from the aftereffects to this day. Eventually the Switch launched, and the PS4 did have to content with it, but the Switch launched three and a half years after the PS4 did; it had a clear playing field for almost half its life.

The PS5, on the other hand, is facing… well, it’s still not facing any meaningful competition from the Xbox side of things, to be fair, but it is facing far more credible and meaningful competition from Nintendo and the Switch. Now in its seventh year, the Switch is putting forth an unprecedented run of sales, and continues to routinely divert customer spending towards it over the PS5 in most major markets even now. Without getting the chance to be the only console there is any meaningful customer spend towards in markets such as Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, or even the UK, the PS5’s sales pace is naturally impacted to at least some degree by the presence of the Switch. Assuming the Switch can maintain its momentum until whenever Nintendo decides to launch the successor, the PS5 may never get a totally clear playing field to itself, which by definition reduces the slice of the addressable market that it gets to sell to for itself.

And while some nonsensical classifications by the CMA in the UK may have ruled that Switch is not really competing with the other two, ultimately that’s not really true, especially not at the broader level of mainstream sales necessary to achieve the kinds of scales we are discussing here. Millions of people bought a cheap PS4 to play Minecraft and Fortnite and FIFA; right now, if they can, instead of a $550 PS5, get a $200 Switch and still get to play those games, plus other mass market friendly games such as Mario Kart or Animal Crossing or Pokemon, then they absolutely will pick that cheaper option with more games that appeal to their segment. Yes, the Switch versions look or run worse, but they obviously don’t care about that. If the performance or graphics were a consideration, the Switch would never have sold that much to begin with.

There is also the fact that there will certainly be some level of “spillage” of the customer base for PS consoles with the PS5; put simply, with Sony porting their games to PC with a frequent regularity now, and third party PS exclusives increasingly available on PC and Switch, there may be many who decide they simply don’t…need the PS5, and that what they do want from it can be addressed with a PC; the PC getting an increasingly console-like experience thanks to innovations such as the Steam Deck also means that PC gaming is no longer as intimidating or friction inducing as it once was. While the broader console market is never going to be swayed by PC gaming, no matter what Valve or anyone else does, a small but significant chunk might be – and that might be what keeps the PS5 from reaching PS4 numbers

All of this might make it sound like the PS5 is not going to match or exceed the PS4, but as I mentioned, it’s likelier that it does than not. At the very least, I think matching the PS4 is a given. Fundamentally, I think this will come down to one reason – while the factors I mentioned previously all hold true, I think collectively, they won’t actually impact the PS5’s final tally that much. I can see it shedding some 10-15% of its audience from the PS4, which would still bring the console in the 100-105 million units sold range; and that difference, I think, can be easily covered up for by the fact that I think this is going to be a longer generation than the previous ones.

While the past two PlayStation generations have both been seven years long each (eight and seven years for Xbox), I think this generation is going to go on a bit longer. The aforementioned geopolitical and global circumstances, such as the economy, the supply chain and shortages, the pandemic, all of that, I think, means that Sony, Microsoft, AMD, and Epic will all want to keep this generation going a bit longer than usual so they can recoup their investments and R&D costs better. This is not at all unprecedented – we already saw this happen in the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, which went on eight full years before their respective successors were introduced (as opposed to the 4-5 year window for new console generations that had been the norm until then), because of the 2008 recession severely impacting and disrupting market dynamics globally. Sony very literally just needs to keep the PS5 going for 1-2 years more than the PS4; meaning, not introduce the PS6 until 2028 at the earliest, and maybe even 2029; and that 10-15 million projected shortfall compared to the PS4 is easily accounted for right there; in fact, that is probably enough for the PS5 to mount a small lead over the PS4 of its own.

All of which is to say, while the PS5 faces a far more challenging environment than the PS4 ever did, I think its broader success is assured, and that it will manage to at the very least match the PS4’s final numbers, if not exceed them, regardless. This comes down to a longer generation for it, yes, but also because of the sheer brute force of its success, and the success of the PS brand as a whole, where even with so many difficulties, the PS5’s sales pace has not been blunted nearly enough to have any real impact. While it is unlikely the PS5 will match the PS2, DS, or Switch, we can, at the very least, expect it to end in the same tier of sales as PS4 and the Game Boy – and that’s a very great success for it regardless.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

On some level, this does make sense – in spite of the general certainty around VR being the next great tech paradigm for not just video games, but computing as a whole (remember, Facebook rebranded itself into a VR oriented company at the height of its powers and prominence, and even companies like Apple were looking into investing in the format), it just never quite caught traction the way you might expect. Meta Quest 2 (née Oculus Quest 2) has certainly done well for itself, selling almost 15 million units globally, and becoming the de facto VR platform for a mainstream audience. But that’s essentially the level of success we are talking about here – the bestselling VR system has sold 15 million. The others? Much, much less than that (given that Meta Quest 2 is the dominant VR platform after all).

Sony’s own original entry into the VR market was the PSVR, and it sold… actually fairly well, with 5 million units sold globally. Now, in a vacuum and in the immediate context of the discussion, those numbers aren’t quite so bad, are they? The PSVR sold a third of the dominant VR platform, and selling 5 million of anything is hardly anything to scoff at. But business decisions, especially financial ones, are never made in a vacuum, and in the broader context, the PSVR’s performance starts to look less impressive, and raises the question of why a follow-up exists at all – and certainly, why in the state it does (we’ll get to this bit shortly).

Just as a reference, the PlayStation 4 sold roughly 115 million units worldwide, meaning that very literally less than 1 in 20 of PS4 owners were willing to buy the PSVR. This, by the way, was in spite of heavy discounts, great bundling, and some not insignificant software support. At the peak of the PSVR’s life cycle, you could buy one for $200, and it would come bundled with some amazing games, such as Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, Iron Man, Gran Turismo Sport… and sometimes even multiple games.

This was also at the peak of VR hype. You know how I alluded to that period where the entire tech world was convinced that VR would be the next step, and there was a lot of optimism and enthusiasm surrounding the format? PSVR came right at the crest of that wave, and rode it to garner a lot of attention, support, and interest. Remember, major third parties were all announcing some fairly big name PSVR projects. Remember when every developer or publisher would have at least some VR project (even if not a full fledged game) planned? And remember how almost all of them hit the PSVR?

That was the market the PSVR launched in, those were the circumstances going in its favor. And with all of that, it managed to sell 5 million units globally.

5 million! That’s a pittance. You know what sold more than 5 million? Very literally every other PlayStation platform ever. This isn’t exaggeration! The original PlayStation sold over 100 million, the PS2 sold over 150 million, the PS3 sold over 80 million, the PS5 is already north of 30 million; the PSP sold over 80 million, even the PS Vita, the one and only real failure the PlayStation brand has had, is estimated to have sold 13-15 million units worldwide (as in, very literally three times as much as PSVR managed).

We’ll get back to the Vita in a bit, because that, after all, is central to the point that I am making here, but for a second, let’s compare the success of PSVR to other PlayStation add ons. The PS Move, for example, sold 15 million units in two years. The EyeToy? 10.5 million units in five years. The PocketStation, which was a Japan-only portable add-on for the PlayStation, sold 5 million units, and that was exclusive to one market.

So even with everything going its way, the PSVR didn’t do too well, and that’s actually not the platform’s fault, the issue appears to be that for the broader public, VR simply is not appealing enough to sell in anything remotely resembling mainstream numbers. So why, then, did Sony persist in sticking with this segment at all? Why, after PSVR, and after seeing the state of the broader VR market, did Sony decide to do a PSVR2?

I don’t ask this question out of spite, but out of consideration for some very basic and straightforward logistics that Sony themselves admitted to back in 2013-14, when the Vita was floundering after being all but abandoned by them. Sony, back then, admitted that supporting two platforms was an increasingly difficult endeavor, that maintaining two distinct development pipelines, with their own distinct set of services and games, was challenging in an era of resource intensive game development. This explanation rang true! It made total sense!

As games become more and more time and resource intensive to develop, supporting multiple systems at a time becomes increasingly difficult, and so Sony wisely made the decision to focus on their core competences, as well as the market where the bulk of their audience lies – high end home consoles. It’s the exact same problem Nintendo faced in the early 2010s, which led to the infamous struggles of the Wii U and 3DS, and which led Nintendo to consolidate their own pipeline and platforms into one hybrid system – once more, we’ll get back to the Switch later, but right now, the point of bringing it up is, Sony’s explanation made sense.

What didn’t make sense is Sony then deciding to… split their resources across two distinct platforms and pipelines anyway, because what do you imagine PSVR is, exactly? Its its own distinct platform, which requires games to be developed for it specifically, and unlike handheld game development, which is just pared back console development, VR game development is a whole other beast, requiring totally different tech pipelines on the development side, and an entirely different set of skills and considerations to be done properly. In other words, it is much more difficult to spread your resources across a console and a VR platform, than it is to do that across a console and a handheld.

If Sony was always going to split resources, why not just stick with the handheld market? Their decision to abandon it does make sense in context of when it was made – this was in the early 2010s. The PS Vita had face planted spectacularly, even Nintendo was struggling to get the 3DS to gain traction, and general wisdom at the time was that dedicated game portables were dead, more or less subsumed by the mobile and tablet gaming market. On the other hand, VR was a promising new frontier with the potential for what then appeared to be massive growth, and with its high tech trappings, potentially very appealing to the audience Sony had cultivated for PlayStation. Deciding to drop the handheld market in favour of the VR one at the time made total and absolute sense! No arguments there at all.

But now, when the state of the VR market, and the performance of the PSVR itself, is on hand and readily referenceable, the decision to double down on VR makes no sense at all. And they’re not just doubling down on the VR market, they are doubling down on it while also stripping away a lot of the advantages the PSVR had that helped it find the traction that it did find in the market. The cost of PSVR2, for example, is eye wateringly high, with its sticker price being at least as much as the PS5 itself in most countries, and higher in several. That sticker shock, which comes right as we are reportedly entering economic recession in years, is already an issue in and of itself, but the PSVR2 also launches in an era where the VR optimism is dead, and the bulk of the development community has decided to jump off the train.

You won’t get an EA Star Wars game with VR compatibility on PSVR2, you’re not getting a Batman Arkham VR game, you’re certainly not getting Bethesda VR games, given that Bethesda is now, you know, owned by Xbox.

Except Horizon, nothing major has been announced from PlayStation Studios! The original PSVR had either full or partial VR support for several Sony games – Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, Concrete Genie, Dreams, Gran Turismo Sport, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, RIGS, Farpoint, Wipeout Omega Collection… remember all those? Games fully playable in VR, games with VR specific modes, games that were VR exclusive, you got everything.

Most of Sony’s bigger IP and developers sat PSVR out (a whole other issue that this really isn’t the place to get into), but there was still a lot. Do you want to know what the PSVR2 has announced from Sony so far? Horizon: Call of the Mountain, and Gran Turismo 7 being fully playable in VR on it. That’s it. That’s all that has been confirmed. This $550 headset is three weeks away from release, and I don’t even know what games I can expect on it from the platform holder. And while I would love to have the faith that Sony will surely support it with their best games and teams, a) they likely won’t, Sony never supports secondary platforms and hardware well (just look at how badly the Vita or even the original PSVR were treated on this front) and b) if you are asking people to buy this extremely expensive peripheral for an arguably expensive console, then you should probably give them some reassurance upfront, rather than holding your cards close to the chest.

Even games aside, the PSVR2 is doing a lot of things that seem to be going against the common recipe for “success” (such as it is) in the VR market – the current trend for VR success mandates wireless headsets. The PSVR2 is wired (though the jumble of wires and breakout boxes that the original PSVR involved have been streamlined to just one). The current trend for VR success is for standalone headsets. The PSVR2 is tethered. The current trend in the VR market is cheap headsets; the PSVR2 is $550 (on top of a $500 console, to be clear), and while, yes, the tech that it packs is amazing, and the price is actually very fair given that, and the PSVR2 is actually cheaper than the original PSVR with inflation considered, that’s not how the market approaches these things.

The average person who might have some interest in PSVR2 but be put off by the price won’t be thinking “okay, the economy is tough and my finances are tight, but it’s okay to spend $550 plus tax on the PSVR2, which has very few games announced for it right now, because the tech is great, and because with inflation considered, I am actually paying less than I would have for the PSVR back in the day.” Arguably, no real person thinks like that, that entire line of counterargument is bunk. The PSVR2 isn’t even building on the success of its own predecessor, with it not being backward compatible, and games having to be updated on an individual basis by developers before they are playable on the PSVR2.

Which now returns me to what is ultimately the point of this whole article – if Sony were going to continue splitting their resources, why did they decide to stick with VR? Again, this isn’t about the original PSVR, as I mentioned, the decision made sense at the time. But in the present day context, the VR market has been shown to be making minimal inroads, and even Sony’s own first VR product was, at most, a heavily caveated success.

You know what market isn’t dying, but thriving? Portables. The market that Sony confidently gave up for dead back in the day made a stunning resurgence off the back of the Switch, which, at 115 million consoles sold, and sales accelerating six years into its life cycle, is currently en route to becoming the highest selling system of all time. The Switch is managing this, by the way, without any price drops. It has demonstrably proven that there is a market for portables, which is something we are seeing in the smattering of imitators that have come up in its wake, the most prominent of which, the Steam Deck, is another huge success in its own right!

Let’s talk about the Steam Deck for a second. It’s a portable system with no exclusives, just the ability to play a portion of your existing library portably. It has already sold over a million units in a year. Before Valve did their fan favorite portable, though, they also did a high end VR headset, a high end VR headset that they pushed with the long awaited next Half-Life game in Half-Life: Alyx. Backed with such a high end, high caliber title from Valve, do you know how much the Valve Index sold? 149,000 units in its first year on the market. You can actually take the lifetime sales of the Index and the HTC Vive (the first VR hardware Valve worked on, albeit in collaboration with HTC) and combine them, and the Steam Deck has still outsold them in a year. With no exclusive games.

All of which is to say, there is a thriving market for portables (given that portables actually represent a real world use case for most people). You don’t have to invest in the portable market, and I can see the logic in not wanting to split your resources… but if you are already doing that, which Sony is, then why are you investing in VR over portables? What sense does that even make? What was the decision making process, not just financially, but also economically, which considers factors such as opportunity cost, which somehow led Sony to this decision?

A Sony portable could have continued subsisting on the kind of low- and mid-tier first party support Sony provided the first PSVR, and it absolutely would have had no shortage of games to play, because the Switch exists – and if you are making games for the Switch (which, see above, pretty much everyone is at this point), then why not also put them on the PS handheld? We no longer live in the era of specialized boutique hardware like the 3DS and Vita, which made multiplatform development across those two difficult.

The Switch uses standardized hardware, development tools, and development pipelines, and any Sony portable would too (in fact, the Vita was actually the first handheld to do that). Any game hitting the Switch or the Steam Deck (which, between the two of them, they cover very literally almost every new game that comes out at this point) would also hit the PS handheld, because why not? Third parties alone could carry it. It would probably not sell Switch levels, it might not even sell PSP levels. But even if it sold 30-40 million units, that would be six to eight times more than the PSVR. And, perhaps most importantly, Sony would still have maintained a meaningful presence in the consumer and development community of Japan, rather than more or less ceding that entire market to Nintendo wholesale and allowing them to encroach upon PlayStation’s territory in terms of success and software support even more.

I just cannot wrap my head around this. What was this decision making? I mean, I know what it was, it was wrong is what it was, but to watch it play out in real time is flabbergasting. Sony has decided to split their resources, and they are going with the VR market over the portable one. I appreciate VR, and I really do hope the kinks that prevent it from catching on are worked out sooner than later, so that the format can hit its full potential, but at this point it is abundantly clear that for the broader market, VR holds less  appeal.

It is an answer to a question no one is asking. To split your resources for that, versus portables, where the financial and strategic advantages would be immense in comparison, and taken on their own as well, is just mind boggling. I wish the PSVR2 well, but in the here and now, if you were to ask me about this entire sequence of decisions and events, I would say this represents some of the poorest decision making ever by Sony in their entire history in the gaming market.

May they prove me wrong.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

One such spin-off is Resident Evil: Revelations, which was released for the Nintendo 3DS back in 2012. The game was praised by critics for its visuals, story, and ambition – though it’s possible that many fans of the franchise may have passed on the game. But more than 10 years later, Resident Evil: Revelations remains one hell of a survival horror experience despite a few cracks that have started to show up.

Revelations follows the story of B.S.A.A. operatives Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine as they embark on a quest to save the world. You see, a bioterrorist organization has been threatening to infect the planet’s oceans with a deadly virus. This terrorist organization – named Veltro – had previously unleashed biological weapons onto a city – and as a last resort to prevent the infection from spreading any further, the entire city had been torched down.

Our boulder-punching protagonist Chris Redfield goes missing while investigating the whereabouts of the organization, following which Jill lands on an abandoned ship by the name of Queen Zenobia. This kickstarts the narrative, and soon players are introduced to new characters and larger-than-life villains all while they peel the layers from conspiracies and betrayals and what have you.

Unlike prior entries, the story is presented in an episodic fashion – which is done with the intention of making the game better suited for portable play. While the narrative can sometimes become too convoluted with characters and plot points that only serve to pad out the story, it retains that zany Resident Evil charm through and through – and on the whole, it’s a pretty enjoyable story that holds an important place in the larger Resident Evil plot.

Over on the gameplay front, Resident Evil: Revelations was made with the intention of recreating the sheer tension of the original games which saw you tip-toeing around spooky mansions all while you only had a handful of bullets in your clip. Later entries like Resident Evil 5 diverted the focus towards action, and while Revelations doesn’t really manage to be as scare-inducing as the originals – it finds itself within the sweet spot between what was at the time new and old.

As fans might already know, the game is played in a third-person perspective with an over-the-shoulder camera. But since the Nintendo 3DS only had one analog stick on the system, aiming your gun switches it up to a first-person perspective – which also slows down your movement speed. While it can feel a bit inconvenient at first, it also adds a sense of tension to the combat proceedings – and it works well given the constraints of the hardware.

Fun fact: Resident Evil: Revelations was the first game to feature support for the 3DS Circle Pad Pro accessory outside of Japan, because Capcom wanted to pounce on every opportunity it could for making the game’s controls better and more flexible for players.

The control shifts between Jill and Chris multiple times during the game, and you must make the most judicious use of your limited resource to reach objectives – which range from solving puzzles to defeating bosses and surviving waves of enemies. The enemies themselves also strike a careful balance between being nimble and slow, and different enemy types obviously require different kinds of strategies to defeat. And even if they come really close, you could always switch to your trusty knife or melee finishers which look great.

You get to choose between different kinds of weapons ranging from the pistol to the submachine gun to shotguns among others – and each feels great to use with varied utility. Each of these weapons can also be upgraded with collected scraps, which adds an element of character progression to the gameplay proceedings as well.

Another new addition in terms of gameplay is the scanner, which is used to – you guessed it, scan your surroundings for resources. While ammunition can be collected without scanning, healing items and some other valuables remain hidden until you scan them with the equipment. Scanning your surroundings over and over again can become taxing after a while, and this particular aspect of the experience is easily one of the more frustrating things about the game.

The levels might not be the most sprawling, which can partly be attributed to the limited memory on the original hardware – but the feeling of claustrophobia that’s induced as you run down narrow corridors and passages actually help the game’s case in bringing back the classic horror that made the original games great in the first place. Sure, sometimes it can get too cramped for its own good – but it’s fine enough for the most part.

And there’s of course, the visuals which look absolutely great. The technical wizards over at Capcom actually utilized a heavily modded version of the MT Framework engine that was used in games like Lost Planet 2 – and the results are incredible. Despite being made for a handheld console, the visuals look really crisp with surprisingly high-quality assets and detailed facial models, and smooth animations – all running without any hitches. Of course, blasting those visuals onto a high-definition screen would make it look all muddy – but on the original 3DS screen, it looks absolutely fantastic.

As mentioned previously, Resident Evil: Revelations turned out to be a successful experiment – with some great critical reception. Capcom even ported the game over to eight-gen consoles in the form of an HD re-release – which is probably the best way to experience this horror classic. The visuals have been upscaled and enhanced alongside reworked controls, which results in an experience that’s very familiar to fans of modern Resident Evil games.

But coming back to the original question, what made Resident Evil: Revelations one hell of a game? It’s pretty hard to pin down exactly since the answer would most likely depend upon what you value most in a Resident Evil game – the story, the gameplay, the scares, or the boss fights – or perhaps the portable nature of this experience. But I think the most interesting thing about the game has to be the sweet middle ground that the game manages to reach; combining the claustrophobic levels and backtracking of the originals with a smooth third-person shooter combat loop inspired by modern shooters results in an experience that’s the best of both worlds – and I think that is what has helped Revelations in garnering a long-standing legacy for itself.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

After the latest weekly Japanese sales charts, the Nintendo Switch has now outsold the lifetime sales of the Nintendo 3DS in Japan (via @GameDataLibrary on Twitter). A graph comparing the sales of the two systems shows an impressive trajectory for the Switch.

Incidentally, this also makes the Switch the third-highest selling gaming system in Japan to date, with over 24.7 million units sold in the region so far. It’s behind the Nintendo DS, which has sold over 32.8 million units, and the Game Boy, which sits at over 32.4 million units. Whether or not it will overtake either of those two remains to be seen, but it looks like it has a pretty good shot.

Of course, with the persisting supply shortages thanks to the global semiconductor shortage, there’s a good chance that sales will slow down at least by some degree going forward. Nintendo recently said there’s “no end in sight” to the shortage, so it should be interesting to see how the Switch copes.

Comparing Switch sales with other platforms that have sold over 10m. pic.twitter.com/xyWQ51tBAg

— Game Data Library (@GameDataLibrary) May 20, 2022

With the excellent Pokemon Legends Arceus marking what looks to be the start of a whole new era for the franchise, this felt like as great a time as any to stop and take stock of the state of the franchise as it stands at the present moment in time. And so, we decided to go ahead and rank the Pokemon games. To be clear, we didn’t rank all of them – that would be insane, and also redundant, since so many games in the series are just slight variations of each other. 

Instead, what we did was take the best representative for each campaign and used it as a stand in for all other games that are also based on the same campaign. Put simply, this list doesn’t rank Pokemon Red/Blue, Yellow, FireRed/LeafGreen, and Let’s Go separately – it just takes what we think is the best one out of those, and ranks that one. (As for which one the best one is, you’re going to have to find that out for yourself now, won’t you?).

Is that clear? Great. Then let’s get started.

10. POKEMON X/Y

Pokemon X/Y was probably the first game in the series that caused wide scale disappointment among the fans – everyone had some complaint or the other with it. It makes sense – the game, which marked the series’ long awaited jump to 3D, was definitely a letdown on many fronts. The story was baffling and banal (even by Pokemon standards), the difficulty level was ramped down to such absurd levels that you could very literally finish the game without even paying attention to what was happening on screen, the region was extremely linear (and lacking in dungeons to a severe degree), there was nothing in the way of a post game, it pandered far too much to the first generation of Pokemon games, and it introduced the smallest roster of new Pokemon to date.

But there was also a lot to like about it – the Player Search System it introduced remains the single best online suite in any Pokemon game to date, and really, one the best multiplayer suites out there, player character customization was a hugely beloved feature that went on to become a series mainstay, it took the first steps towards making Pokemon training and team composition easier and more transparent by giving players direct control over the growth of their Pokemon, it added a brand new type that upended the meta game almost entirely, the Mega Evolutions battle gimmick was really fun, the design of the new Pokemon was uniformly excellent, and it looked charming as all heck with its chibi style 3D graphics. In hindsight, X/Y have become the most inessential Pokemon entries, because almost everything they did well went on to be appropriated by future games in the series, who would do it much better – and its shortcomings never got the chance to be fixed by an expansion or re-release, as would happen for so many other games in the series. But in spite of that, they’re very fun games, and probably exemplify the sentiment that even a “bad” Pokemon game remains an extremely well made, charming, and satisfying game to play through.

9. POKEMON BLACK 2/WHITE 2

The fifth generation of Pokemon was a wild time for the franchise, rife with experimentation and all sorts of new things the series had never dared attempt until then. One of those was a direct sequel – the first and only direct sequel to a game taking place in the same region the series has seen to date.

It made sense, though – the excellent Pokémon Black/White (which we’ll get to later on in the list) left a lot of sequel hooks in their story, and Unova was an amazing setting that clearly had more to offer. Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 deliver on that, but the adventure we get is decidedly inferior to the original games. While these are still excellent games, and essential for anyone who enjoyed the original Black/White, the campaign eschews a lot of the boldness and novelty that made the original games stand out so much, squandering the narrative opportunities hinted at by the originals (and in some cases it outright undermines them), and mechanically don’t really expand on the original games enough to really stand out on their own. They do offer a meaty, hefty post-game, and a frankly absurd amount of content – and all of it is absolutely great. But when you play through all Pokemon games, these ones tend to stand out less than the others – because very honestly, most of what they do was already done better by the original Black/White just one year prior, and they don’t really bring enough unique stuff of their own to the table to make up for that.

8. POKEMON ULTRA SUN/ULTRA MOON

Pokemon Sun/Moon were extremely interesting games – bold and ambitious, willing to experiment with the structure of the franchise, doubling down on a pointed narrative and storytelling focus, and giving us the most fleshed out and believable look at the world of Pokemon to date. They offered a lot of excellent stuff – Alola is a great region with a lot of personality and a distinct aesthetic, the new Pokemon designs are amazing and contextualized in extremely believable ways as part of a larger ecology and even the story and characters were interesting. But Sun/Moon were extremely flawed games, with their story falling apart towards the final act, extreme linearity and railroading making for the least player driven Pokemon game to date, an overabundance of cutscenes with trite and repetitive dialog that you could not ever skip, an online suite that was a shocking regression on the excellent X/Y, and, yet again, an acute lack of post-game content.

Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon… well, they don’t really fix Sun/Moon, but they patch them up to a level that they are no longer the worst games in the series (if Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon didn’t exist, yes, I would have absolutely placed the original Sun/Moon at the bottom of this list). They tweak the story and characters to be less bizarre towards the end, the cutscenes spacing and story pacing is improved, areas get bigger, allowing for more exploration (though overall progression remains extremely rigidly linear), the post game gets a hefty chunk of new content to sink teeth into, and they add an absurd amount of content to the original game as well. They are also among the most difficult games in the series, with a certain specific fight near the end being legendary for how brutal it is.

Sun/Moon, much like most other games in the series in the 3DS era, are flawed and a tale of missed opportunity – but Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon existing at least makes that missed potential slightly easier to swallow, if only because it hints at what might have been had developers Game Freak taken the time to properly flesh things out with their games.

7. POKEMON SWORD/SHIELD

The single most controversial entry in the franchise, Pokemon Sword/Shield became flashpoints for controversy. There were loads of reasons for this – a decade of resentment building over repeated disappointing entries, poor communication by the developers and publishers for taking away a lot of content that players expect from these games, and extremely poor graphical quality, even considering Pokemon has never been a technical showpiece, all became easy latching on points for the backlash these games generated.

I would argue that to a very large degree, the backlash was not undeserved. Pokemon Sword and Shield are not bad games at all, but they are very clearly products of a rushed and troubled development cycle. The new region they introduced was visually distinct and hints at lush beauty and interesting lore, but the games never get around to it. There was, at launch, a total paucity of post game content again. The games forced further mechanics that trivialized the difficulty even further, making for the easiest games in the series at the time of release. The Wild Area concept, a mini open world region for players to explore and catch Pokemon in, was conceptually sound, but fumbled in execution. The online functionality was a baffling step back from the 3DS era. They cut down almost half of the roster of Pokemon.

But in spite of that laundry list of complaints, the core campaign was extremely compelling and fun, and knew to get out of the players’ way to let them enjoy the adventure at their own pace (something the Alola games had categorically failed at); new mechanics such as Max Raids were excellent, and giving players full control over how their Pokemon grow was game changing. The characters are excellent. And while the Wild Area was underdeveloped, and the story never fleshed out, both managed to stumble upon some rather unforgettable moments nevertheless, with a certain late game story development still ranking as one of my favorite story moments in the series. And all of this is before we consider the excellent expansions, which actually addressed a lot of the complaints players had with the base games – they added in another couple hundred of the missing Pokemon back in, they delivered fully fleshed out open world areas that properly leveraged 3D space and delivered a believable patchwork of biomes and ecosystems that rewarded player exploration, and they offered some actual meaningfully difficult battles as well; plus, given that they are meant to be post-game content, they naturally address the absence of post-game in the base titles too.

Even with the expansions, Sword and Shield are an unfortunate tale of missed potential (I’m sure you’re picking up on this being a running theme) – but in spite of what their troubled reputation might suggest, they are very good games, and absolutely worth playing regardless of their many stumbles. What they do well, they do really well, and ultimately, their take on the core Pokemon formula, while finally beginning to strain at the seams by this point, still delivered a compelling, engaging, and fun adventure.

6. POKEMON EMERALD

This is likely to be the most controversial entry on this list, because Pokemon Emerald is beloved by a army of Pokemon fans. You can see why – Emerald, building upon the good but flawed Ruby/Sapphire, is arguably the apex of Pokemon games in almost every regard. The campaign was long and challenging; there was a ridiculous amount of side and optional content; the Hoenn region in Emerald is extremely memorable, with some standout locations, excellent dungeons, and fantastic level design; the story and characters were the best the series had seen at the time Emerald came out; the post-game was meaty and over-delivered, marking the debut of the fan favorite Battle Frontier (the absence of which in every new game in the series is lamented to this day).

Pokemon Emerald was absolutely amazing, and honestly I have nothing bad to say about it. Why, then, is it ranked so relatively low on the list? The answer is simple, we have now gotten to the part of the list where every single game is an amazing, excellent title and could justify placement at the top, depending on how you choose to classify and rank things. Basically, we’re now looking at six, amazing, excellent games, and trying to rank them is a bit like splitting hairs – no matter what you do, you’re still left with six amazing games. Emerald ranks lower than the others in this bunch because I feel the ones higher on this list than it did everything better for my liking. But that doesn’t take away from how incredible Pokemon Emerald is. It’s an amazing game, and legitimately one of the best RPGs of all time – everyone owes it to themselves to check it out.

5. POKEMON BLACK/WHITE

Pokémon Black/White marked the fourth new Pokemon entry on the DS, an at the time unprecedented volume of mainline games on a single system. Game Freak knew that to make these games stand out, they would have to work hard to give them their own identity. And they decided to do just that, in the process delivering among the best, and probably still among the most ambitious, games in the series to date.

Everything about Pokémon Black/White was so incredible – Unova as a region, basing itself on the urban aesthetic of continental United States, was a breath of fresh air after four regions based on Japan; a massive roster of new Pokemon (the single largest new batch to date, in fact) headlined these games, with Pokémon Black/White making the bold decision to only have new Pokemon in the game for the duration of the campaign – you’d be able to bring in your older pals, but they’d be limited to post-game content, meaning every new encounter was fresh and exciting in a way it hadn’t been for over a decade by the time Black/White came out.

And speaking of post-game, the post-game was fleshed out and meaty (the last time a new generation would deliver on this front). As good as that post-game was, it paled next to the campaign, a blisteringly fast story driven adventure (yes) that actually raised troubling ethical questions about the concept of catching and battling Pokemon (yes), with some legitimately well written characters and antagonists (yes), pulling in and recontextualizing the regular “win badges and beat The Pokemon League” conceit into the framework of a broader story (yes), delivering some legitimately surprising story developments and twists (yes), and culminating in an incredibly epic final act and a hell of a conclusion (yes).

All this, and I still haven’t talked about how this game marked the first time the series did away with the annoying HMs as a progression mechanic, the new experience curve mechanics that worked so much better for game balance than the EXP All that the games would force on the players in future entries, how much optional content there was, how excellent the region and dungeon design was, the new battle styles the games introduced (Rotation and Triple battles, I miss you…), how it simultaneously managed to represent the series’ first forays into 3D spaces, while delivering eye catching and attractive sprite art that remains arguably the best aesthetic the series has had to date… honestly, I can gush about these games forever, they were utterly excellent, thoroughly compelling, and so perfect, so great, so ambitious, that at the time they painted a bright picture for the future of the franchise.

The decade that would follow would not deliver on their promise – in part because Black/White remain the lowest selling mainline entries in the series to date, I assume. And that really sucks, because until very recently, Pokémon Black/White was the last time the series managed to deliver a truly great game. If you can, I urge you to track these down and play them – they are amazing, not just at being Pokemon games, just at delivering incredible RPGs.

4. POKEMON FIRERED/LEAFGREEN

Pokemon Red/Blue were borderline perfect – which is a terrible burden for games launching a series developed by a small, boutique development house that clearly was unprepared for how big their passion project would become. But let’s put aside that broader context for a second and just talk about Pokemon Red/Blue as games assessed on their own merits. To this day, those titles hold up. Oh sure, their primitive and rudimentary graphics are a bit of an adjustment, and they are so buggy that they would make a Bethesda game blush. But holy crap, did they nail the game design side of things perfectly. They took players on an amazing adventure, simultaneously breezy and challenging in just the right amounts, with a great campaign, amazing and memorable creature designs, wonderful lock and key progression, and a lot of optional content for players who went off the beaten path.

Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen, which remade Red/Blue, are all of that but better. Modernizing the original games to bring them to the standard of the then-current third generation of Pokemon, they polish away the bugs, modernize the graphics, add even more optional content, introduce a lot of QoL and UX functionality the original titles were missing, add a ridiculously hefty chunk of post-game content (the one area the originals were, understandably, lacking in), flesh out their world and region even more, and do so all while remaining incredibly faithful to games that were played and beloved by 40 million players worldwide. They also started off the series’ now longstanding tradition of revisiting older titles via enhanced remakes, and they set the bar incredibly high, delivering the definitive take on the Kanto saga, a take so definitive that even the more modern Pokemon Let’s Go games, which are also remakes of the original generation, did not supplant them.

FireRed/LeafGreen are perfect. As I mentioned earlier, we’re splitting hairs at this point.

3. POKEMON LEGENDS: ARCEUS

Ten years of constant disappointment and unfulfilled promises, mismanagement and rushed development cycles, ten years of consistently managing to lower the bar, and still not meeting it. There’s no wonder that people had no confidence coming into Pokemon Legends: Arceus, because the last decade has been a difficult one for Pokemon fans.

But Game Freak finally threw off the shackles of 25 years of tradition and reinvented Pokemon in a bold new format – and managed to nail it, hitting the ball out of the park on their very first go. A lot like the original Pokemon Red/Blue, amusingly enough. 

Pokemon Legends is such an incredible game. The open world design lends itself beautifully well to the Pokemon franchise, The Pokemon themselves are recontextualized as dangerous, lethal wildlife, the world is harsh and unforgiving and requires the player’s wit and ingenuity to traverse, the maps beckon and invite player exploration and discovery, the Pokemon are delightfully well realized as living and breathing flesh and blood members of a larger ecosystem, the changes to the battle mechanics work well for the game, the new additions such as crafting and Pokedex research all contribute to a self perpetuating, ridiculously addictive gameplay loop, the story is surprisingly fun with some great characters, the action RPG segments actually work surprisingly well, there are several dramatic leaps forward in so many areas (from QoL to mechanics to structure) and there is a ridiculous amount of content thrown in, with, yes, a very hefty post game. It is a shockingly accomplished take on an entirely new formula, and like with Pokemon Red/Blue, Game Freak comes dangerously close to getting it perfect on their first go.

Yes, it has flaws – most notably, it is a bad looking game, with the technical aspects and art style never coming together (somehow, it is still a better performing game than something like Sword/Shield, however), and there are a fair few bugs and glitches here. But ultimately, Legends is a bold new step for the series, and one that it manages to take with a surprising amount of confidence and and dexterity, delivering one of the best games on the Switch, and one of the best games in the series in the process.

2. POKEMON PLATINUM

Sinnoh is very legitimately one of the greatest game maps of all time. It’s a masterpiece of design, with ridiculous amounts of visual and location variety (swamps, mountains, snow, beach and coastal areas, forests, small pastoral villages, big urban cities), and an incredible lock and key design that, while overly reliant on an annoying HM mechanic, leads to the best sense of adventure and discovery the player ever gets in the Pokemon franchise. It’s also backed with some amazing lore and backstory, and massive areas that beg to be explored, tucked away with dozens upon dozens of hidden dungeons and optional quests that you could miss for years without even knowing they exist.

Sinnoh, being the region that Pokemon Platinum is set in, is a huge part of why this game is so great. When you have a map this well designed, and progression through it this well designed, you end up with an unforgettable game. But even beyond that, Platinum was just mind blowingly incredible – it has an excellent campaign, a shocking amount of multiplayer modes, great post game (the Battle Frontier returned!), just the right amount of challenge (people tell horror stories about Cynthia to this day), some great and iconic player designs, major strides forward for the series (including the Physical/Special attack split, as well as the introduction of online play), as well as polishing up the considerable rough edges Diamond/Pearl had – those games suffered majorly from the transition from GBA to DS, and are borderline impossible to go back to because of their bevy of technical issues (including a frame rate so low it’s like walking through treacle). 

Platinum remains the definitive take on Sinnoh to this day (even the recent remakes Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl do not supplant it), and is honestly peak Pokemon. Or at least, it would be, were it not for…

1. POKEMON HEARTGOLD/SOULSILVER

You knew this was coming. There is one thing constant in Pokemon lists and fans – HeartGold/SoulSilver are always at the top. And with good reason – these games are literally, legitimately, perfect, absolutely flawless at every single thing they do, while managing to deliver the biggest and best Pokemon games ever. The original Gold/Silver games were already extremely notable for their massive campaign (set across two regions, 16 gym badges, and two separate Pokemon League challenges) and the introduction of several major and mind blowing mechanics for the franchise, including real time time of day and week impacting in-game events, berry farming, Pokeball crafting, shiny Pokemon, trainer rematches, roaming Legendary Pokemon, held items for Pokemon, weather effects in battles and arenas, and the introduction of Dark and Steel Type Pokemon.

HeartGold/SoulSilver have all of that, plus an additional ridiculous amount of content (mainline, post-game, and optional), gorgeous pixel art graphics that keep these games looking the best ones in the series to this day, almost a decade and a half after their original launch, the availability of every single Pokemon at the time all in one game, plus the inclusion of Platinum‘s Battle Frontier, a brand new Safari Zone, brand new mini games, major QoL and UI enhancements (these games are the only ones that can be played almost entirely via touch screen!), full featured (for the time) local and online multiplayer, and the definitive take on one of the most epic final battles in any game ever. Excellent world and dungeon design, some actual challenging battles, an emphasis on player driven exploration and discovery, a non linear campaign that allows players to break sequence multiple times, and snappy and sharp writing. These games are perfect. There is no flaw to them. They represent among the best games ever made, not just for Pokemon, but in general. 

If you are going to play one Pokemon game, make it this one. 13 years after their initial release, and they still have not been topped. They probably never will be.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.