The NX To Blur The Lines Between Home Console And Handheld According To Pokémon Company President

There have been plenty of rumours flying around about the NX, Nintendo’s next Gen console especially on what kind of console it will be. Well one thing has been pretty much cleared up, it is apparently some form of hybrid between Home Console and Handheld according to The Pokémon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara.

Ishihara told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview that Pokémon titles will be coming to the Nintendo NX, which he describes will be blurring the lines between home console and handheld. Ishihara negated confirmation that a Pokémon Title will be available at the launch of NX in March 2017 but he did confirm with enthusiasm  that the company will be supporting the next gen console.

“The NX is trying to change the concept of what it means to be a home console device or a hand-held device. We will make games for the NX.”

What will be interesting to see is whether we could be seeing the mainline series of Pokémon coming to “Home Console” or rather the Hybrid as most Pokémon games that come to home console have mostly been spin-offs or have had means via specialized hardware (Transfer Pak for example). So with the NX being some kind of middle ground console between Home and Handheld, we may actually get a “main” installment of Pokémon for this console.

Tsunekazu Ishihara also revealed that he was indeed surprise by the impact of Pokémon Go since it launched and that Pokémon merchandise sales are 30-50% above what was expected thanks to the popularity of the mobile app. He then disclosed that one-on-one battles will be coming to Pokémon GO in the near future which is something Niantic CEO John Hanke also mentioned:

“I feel like the reaction we saw was 10 times or even 100 times bigger than we expected.

Battling is a category that we do best at Pokémon, after all… it’s important to really carefully consider any feature that may increase the difficulty and raise the barrier to entry for more casual users.”

It seems that there is still some good things coming to the Pokémon GO so it is now just a case of when one-on.one battles and the always mentioned “trading” will come into play. Only time will tell.

Source: Nintendo Life