Some fans upset by Pokemon Sword and Shield‘s controversial Pokedex compendium have decided to take matters into their own hands.
Let’s take a step back to properly examine this situation. See, most of the previous Pokemon games allowed you to import data from older titles in order to eventually enjoy a complete Pokedex of Pokemon. Developer Game Freak caused a bit of a stir when they announced that Sword and Shield will not allow you to add data from older Pokemon titles. That means that the only Pokemon from older games that are featured in the Switch title are those that were added to the game’s new region from the start.
This decision (and Game Freak’s questionable explanations for it) has led some people to protest Sword and Shield. Others have taken a more direct approach for satisfaction.
Hackers are currently working on unofficial ways to add “missing” Pokemon to Sword and Shield. For instance, some dataminers are currently using in-game files that reference missing Pokemon in order to add those creatures to their Pokedex and rosters. The fact that those Pokemon are even referenced in the game could suggest that they will eventually be added to the Switch title in a more official format.
Advertisement
However, there are other hackers that are going further than that by simply modifying the game’s files and manually adding additional Pokemon to the title. That sounds promising, but the early hackers that are taking that approach have already stated that the process of manually adding Pokemon to Sword and Shield requires quite a few hours of work. On top of the process of actually adding the Pokemon to the game, there’s the considerable matter of making it so that they look like they belong in the title. That means animation smoothing and other essential processes.
Neither of these methods are necessarily ideal, but they speak to the lengths that fans are willing to go to in order to ensure that Sword and Shield feature complete Pokemon rosters.
Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.
Read and download the Den of Geek NYCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!