Pokémon Winds and Waves Could Completely Change Pokémon Forever

Published Oct 3, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Amid silence from Game Freak, leaks suggest radical new directions for the series What clues can we discern from looking at the back of Browt?Image: Game Freak/The Pokémon Company, Nintendo When Pokémon Winds and Waves arrive and introduce Gen 10 Pokémon in 2027, five years will have elapsed since the advent of Gen 9 with 2022's Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. By Pokémon standards, that's a long gap — the longest ever between mainline games and new Pokémon generations, which are usually in the three-to-four year range. It's hardly surprising. The increasing amount of time and money it takes to make video games is an extremely well-established fact at this point. And it's fair to say that Pokémon fans are getting off lightly; it has, after all, been 13 years since the last Grand Theft Auto game. But Pokémon fans aren't used to it. Moreover, the entire Pokémon media franchise sustains itself on the regular appearance of new creatures. There's a void to be filled, but developer Game Freak has been silent since Winds and Waves were announced in February. So, naturally, the void is being filled with leaks. There was a substantial new drop of information on Winds and Waves this week, lots of it quite granular, and some of it very exciting — especially the apparently vast size of the games' map. But it's not exactly new, because the info comes from the massive "terraleak" data breach which Game Freak suffered in 2024, and which started to spill in earnest a year ago. Either it has taken this long for leakers to find the information in the mountain of data, or leakers have started developing their own scheduled PR strategies. (I wouldn't be entirely surprised.) This latest leak caps months of reveals, some of them directly pertaining to Winds and Waves, some not. Last week, for example, design documents emerged of a potential Pokémon MMO in development, a prospect both wondrous and terrifying, not to mention fraught with risk for Game Freak. Boy, imagine if it worked, though. Perhaps even more significant has been the trickle of news suggesting changes are coming to the fundamental building blocks of the series, including how Pokémon evolve, with the advent of Seed Pokémon that can have infinite variations. There are also purportedly new, dynamically evolving turn-based battles, new Pokémon, and oh, maybe the Professor is actually a time-traveling Charles Darwin this time? It's true that the leaked material is at least two years old, and could be inaccurate now. But it sounds like Game Freak's plans for Winds and Waves, and the future of the series, are ambitious and include some radical new ideas. Fans might have mixed feelings about this; Game Freak's ambition sometimes seems to outstrip its technical mastery, and the studio is still adjusting to its shift to open-world design a generation ago. At the same time, Pokémon, like any game series, needs to move forward. And it can only be a good thing that Game Freak isn't taking too reverential an approach to its sacred cash cow. Roll on 2027. eShop game of the week: Keep Driving Here's a completely different kind of driving game: a turn-based management RPG about taking long road trips in an old banger in your aimless early 20s. Pick up annoying hitchhikers and carefully manage your meager resources of cash, food, wakefulness, and weed. Nostalgic and totally compelling. Nintendo Classics game of the week: Pokémon Snap During the long wait for Winds and Waves, now would be an ideal moment to start a run through one of the Pokémon classics — Diamond and Pearl, perhaps, which Polygon's Jason Venter argues still makes a perfect starting point. But none of them are on Nintendo Classics, and we have to make do with spinoffs. So how about this delightful if slight Pokémon photography sim for N64? Nintendo Music track of the week: "Digital Camera / Cell Phone (Photo Channel)" from Wii Channels Space out to the hopeful, twinkly minimalism of the mid-2000s with this dreamy Wii channel ambient soundtrack. It's not all about the Wii Shop bossa nova, you know. (You can find a playlist of all Switchboard's Nintendo Music picks here.) This week's most interesting releases Octopath Traveler & Octopath Traveler 2 Oct. 1 Switch 2 Brilliant HD-2D RPGs get native Switch 2 versions, but the lack of upgrade path/save compatibility from Switch is unforgivable Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered Oct. 1 Switch 2 25th anniversary refresh of the classic musou Moros Protocol Oct. 1 Switch 2 Boomer-shooter roguelite with a cool pixelated look Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed Oct. 6 Switch 2 Remake of the 2010 Wii platformer created by Deus Ex's Warren Spector