Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out tomorrow, October 31. Whether you’re a seasoned veteran of developer BioWare’s fantasy RPGs or a newcomer looking to see what all the fuss is about, it’s worth noting that The Veilguard represents a pretty drastic shift from the tactical, open-zone RPG gameplay of its predecessor, Dragon Age: Inquisition. So no matter what your previous experience, there are a few things worth noting before you dive into this long-awaited return to Thedas. I’ve put over 60 hours into the game, so here are a few things I’ve learned for you to keep in mind as you get started. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Each year, The Pokémon Company holds a competition to find a new illustrator for their Pokémon TCG cards. Only in the last couple of years has this been opened to entrants from outside of Japan, and with that has come controversy. However, after a tumultuous period, the finalists for this year’s contest have finally been picked, and damn, it’s all beautiful work.
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After people made a fuss, The Pokémon Company acknowledged the issue, and said they’d be disqualifying the cheat, and allowing other legitimate entries in to fill the spaces. It remained concerning that such obvious shenanigans had been let through, but TPC is notoriously enigmatic and incommunicative, so even this was a surprising move.
However, we can now sweep that all aside, and instead celebrate the legitimate artists who deserve their wins. And wow, there’s some great stuff here.
The Official Pokémon YouTube channel
The competition is broken into a number of categories, with the emphasis on the smaller, landscape images that appear in the windows on a regular Pokémon card. While the prized cards are generally the portrait full-art designs, it makes sense to constrain entrants to the windowed images, with its inherent limitations.
The categories are Best Standard Card Illustration, Best ex Card Illustration, and a Grand Prize.
The middle category is the odd one out, since non-alt-art ex cards are highly restrictive in their nature, leaving little room for originality. It’s a great piece of Toxtricity art by Anderson, certainly, and it won because of its use of the space to depict a unique angle for the Pokémon, but it’s harder to get excited about.
Image: Anderson / The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
What’s so lovely about the two other winners, however, is quite how different they are.
The Pokémon Company is getting better and better at featuring ever more lavish art, but is still quite conservative on style, so seeing the pick for Best Standard Card Illustration is a real treat. It’s a stunning depiction of Feraligatr by artist Acorviart, inspired by linocut and risograph printing.
Image: Acorviart / The Pokémon Company
The Grand Prize is certainly more conventional, but makes up for it in adorable. Pikachu perhaps seems a little on the nose, but Kazuki Minami’s painting is breathtaking. What works so incredibly well here is the intricate detail of the background flowers, contrasted with the far simpler depiction of Pika, in such a cute and recognizable pose. And that light on his face…come on.
Image: Kazuki Minami / The Pokémon Company
I want to highlight a few of the runners up, too. Firstly, another Feraligatr, this time by tayu, which appears to be one of the most spectacular pieces of embroidery I’ve ever seen. There are so few multimedia artists making Pokémon cards, despite how popular the wonderful Yuka Morii’s clay art has been for 25 years. Also, it’s a wonderful picture beyond the media.
Illustration: tayu / The Pokémon Company
In a contest that was upset by AI slop, it’s lovely to see a piece that AI would try to copy, and get horribly wrong. This Melmetal by gohealth feels so gloriously metallic, and yet so cartoonishly stylized. Also, when did you last see a Melmetal sit down?!
Image: gohealth / The Pokémon Company
Shiho So’s Pikachu is one of the 15 Judges’ Award winners (alongside so many more Feraligatr!), and would be one of those cards that’d make you smile every time you pulled it from a pack. It’s just joyful.
Image: Shiho So / The Pokémon Company
And why not end with yet another Pikachu? satoutubu’s art here is…I just want to hug it! I want to exist in a world where creatures look like this. If satoutubu became a regular Pokémon TCG artist, I’d immediately begin collecting all their cards.
Hey, remember that little game Palworld? Well as of today, it’s surpassed a staggering 25 million players, all within about a month of its early access launch. That’s a lot of people shooting at or alongside their legally distinct “pals,” not Pokémon. Love it or hate it—or don’t get it all, like myself—people have certainly been showing up in droves to see what Palworld is all about after being hyped up as “Pokémon With Guns.”
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According to developer Pocketpair, its open-world survival game Palworld has crossed this impressive milestone across both the Steam and Xbox versions of the game. On Steam at least, where the game is in early access and for purchase, Palworld has sold nearly 15 million copies. The remaining 10 million players in that figure are on Xbox and Windows, where Palworld is available as part of the Game Preview program via Xbox Game Pass. Though it has slowed over the course of the last month, it’s still an impressive figure that makes Palworld the biggest release of the year two months in.
Palworld’s ascendancy from meme to legit hit has been an astonishing sight. For a while there, it seemed to be growing by a million or so players a day. By the end of January, Palworld was sitting pretty at about 20 million players, dwarfing pretty much any other release at the time. Not all the attention Palworld has received in the month since has been great, though. Its popularity raised concerns about the potential use of AI in its development, and of course, some very valid points about how closely its “pals” resemble a number of existing Pokémon. It was all enough attention to get a statement out of The Pokémon Company claiming they were essentially keeping an eye on Palworld.
Nonetheless, Palworld’s rise continues, even if some of its initial engagement has dropped off over the last month, and I’m sure we’ll be updating these numbers for a while to come.
Next year is to bring us a whole new set of shiny Pokémon, when the Paldean Fates set hits streets January 26. We already knew it would, of course, contain a shiny Charizard. But now we’ve seen it, and oh god it’s going to cost so much money.
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Japan is getting its version of this set, Shiny Treasures ex, a lot sooner, cards going on release December 1. So this means we’re seeing what a lot of the cards will look like a lot earlier on than we have with more recent sets (the current Paradox Rift had cards appear internationally before some of their Japanese equivalents appeared), and today we’ve seen the Special Illustration Rare of the shiny Charizard. It has every sign of being the biggest, most sought-after new Pokémon card in years.
Image: The Pokémon Company
What’s the reasoning for this? It’s the combination of three factors. First, and most obviously, it’s Charizard. Anything featuring the not-a-dragon beast gets tagged with a premium, due to its overwhelming popularity among players. Make that Zard shiny, and it’s entire other leagues.
Secondly, it’s the complexity of the card. The more detail present, the more popular cards tend to be, and this terastallized Charizard is a spectacular piece of art.
Artist Akira Egawa has been producing the most astonishing string of incredible cards in the last couple of years, and is responsible for by far the highest priced on the resale market. She was behind all four of Crown Zenith’s blisteringly good gold cards, Fusion Strike’s Mew VMAX alt-art, the Mewtwo V-Union four-parter, and most relevantly here, Obsidian Flames’ Charizard ex. On release the latter was selling raw at over $100, and still sits at over $60 pack fresh.
And thirdly, yes, it’s that this new card matches that Charizard ex, and will inevitably send the price up on both of them. This new shiny version is a wholly original piece of art, but one that matches the style and theme of the former. It shows a Charizard terastallized into a Dark-type, but now in its black-skinned shiny form, the red insides of its wings reflecting a hundred other colors in the cracked-mirror design.
Image: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
I couldn’t care less about Charizard, and I want this card. (A desire not helped by my son’s mad luck at pulling the Obsidian Flames version from a pack.) My guess would be the Japanese version will start selling for around $300 pack fresh, and the international version next year will easily hit $200, before coming down to about half that. I also think this could be the first new card in a very long while to see PSA 10 prices hitting $750. (For reference, 2021’s infamous Moonbreon peaked at $1,300 in a 10, and is now around $740.)
The scarcity will be increased by Paldean Fates being a s0-called “special set,” meaning booster packs won’t be sold individually (unless your LCS tears down boxes). However, there’s a small glimmer of hope given that this will be the first time there will be six-pack Booster Bundles of a special set, The Pokémon Company’s incredibly welcome way of selling just packs without vast cardboard boxes also containing oversized cards, pins, stickers and goodness knows what else.
Paldean Fates is the third shiny-containing set to hit the Pokémon TCG, following 2019’s Hidden Fates and 2021’s Shining Fates. We’ll bring you a lovely gallery of the all the prettiest cards revealed so far in the near future.
If I told you there was a Pokémon card going for $50, you’d wonder why I was bothering you. In a world where such things regularly change hands in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, such a figure is a shrug. But sorry, I should have been clearer: it’s a birthday card. A brand new one. Mass-produced. It’s a $50 birthday card.
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Now, The Pokémon Company has been overcharging for greetings cards plenty, and I’ve previously triple-checked to see how many cards you get in a $15 or $20 pack, only to be flummoxed that the total really is one. But $50?! What’s the point of having access to an internationally famous, widely-read, top-tier gaming site when all the staff are on holiday if you can’t use it to complain about that?
The card prices are—I hesitate to use the word “justified”—by always including a Pokémon pin, too. The site’s tiny metal badges also go for wallet-punching figures, rarely less than ten dollars, and sometimes as much as $25. (This is something that bemuses me, given similarly sized pins are routinely included in triple-pack blisters as “freebies”.) So when you’re paying $9.99 for a “Happy New Year” card, you’re really paying for the Pikachu pin that pokes through the hole in the front.
But this latest $50 birthday card? It’s…it’s functionally identical to the one linked above, with the same size pin, the same Pokémon on the pin, the same sort of cut-out design, and as far as I can tell, it’s not printed on paper-thin diamond.
Image: The Pokémon Center
At first I gallantly assumed the description of “Pikachu Birthday Balloons Pokémon Pin & Greeting Card” meant it was going to also come with an amazing Pikachu balloon, and possibly a large bar of gold bullion. But it seems the only balloons included are those drawn on the cardboard, and the only sign of gold is the color of the lettering.
And no matter how many times I re-read the page, it still doesn’t say, “Pack of 20″ anywhere, no matter how much all of reality says it should.
I realize the trap I fall in if I say, “How can they justify a fifty dollar price for a folded in half piece of cardboard,” given the money I’ve spent on unfolded pieces of cardboard from the same company. But still.
We have of course reached out the Pokémon to check this isn’t a matter of a typo, because then wouldn’t everyone look silly? In the meantime, you can comment below complaining what a slow news day it must be, and how everything’s such a rip-off in this day and age that we shouldn’t be surprised.
The Pokémon Company held a new Pokémon Presents showcase to talk about upcoming projects in the series. If you missed the show, you can catch the VOD right here, but if you just want to know the highlights, read on.
During an Anime Expo press junket for Netflix’s upcoming anime, Pokémon Concierge, actress Rena Nōnen, also known as Non, revealed what it was like working on the stop-motion anime series and how its warm animation style will make any fan wish Pokémon resorts were real.
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Pokémon Concierge follows a hardworking girl named Haru who works as a concierge at a resort where she shows hospitality to and fulfills the needs of weary Pokémon and their trainers. Pokémon Concierge also serves as the first collaboration between The Pokémon Company and the stop-motion studio Dwarf Animation.
“I’m sure we’ve all [felt like] we are bombarded, under pressure, or that we don’t want to get up and keep doing what we’ve been doing and just give up. But when you see Pokémon Concierge, it’s really therapeutic and it makes you want to try and be the best you can be,” Non said. “I wish viewers will see Pokémon Concierge [and feel like] they can keep going.”
Netflix
Learning how to voice act for a stop-motion anime series
One significant experience Non went through while recording voice lines for Haru was being filmed while she was pantomiming the struggles and frustration Haru endures in the series so that her facial expressions and mannerisms could be utilized to animate Haru and give weight to her puppet’s performance.
“Once I saw the finished scenes, they were very different from what you’d see in 2D, 3D, or CG animation. I was able to feel like ‘Oh, [stop motion] is also how you can enjoy Pokémon,” Non said. “When I saw [Haru] in action, I felt that it was totally believable and convincing.”
Netflix
Why Psyduck is the perfect companion for Pokémon Concierge
Shedding some light on her character,Non said that Haru, who often overworks herself and places a lot of pressure on herself to meet others’ expectations, learns that it’s okay to make mistakes and to not be so hard on herself over the course of the series. She’s aided in that journey of personal growth by her companionship with Psyduck, the Pokémon she meets at her new job working at the resort.
“When I was playing Pokémon games, Mewtwo was my favorite character. But when I started working on Pokémon Concierge, Psyduck in stop-motion animation… he’s just so adorable,” Non said. “Because he’s so cute he’s currently my favorite [Pokémon].”
Photo: Kotaku / Isaiah Colbert
Although Psyduck serves as Haru’s companion in the anime, Non assured fans that they’ll get to see other Pokémon as well throughout the series.
Pokémon Concierge is slated to premiere on Netflix this December.
Kotaku is covering everything at Anime Expo 2023, including big announcements at panels and exclusive one-on-one interviews with the industry’s biggest creators. Whether you’re a seasoned anime fan or a newbie, you can keep up with all things Anime Expo 2023 here.
I don’t collect Pokémon cards much myself. I have a select few cards I’ve kept over the years, mostly ones of my favorite monsters or sporting characters I like such as the Professor’s Research card featuring my husband Professor Turo. But I am always captivated by the art The Pokémon Company slaps on a piece of cardstock and throws into a pack with other pieces of cardstock for kids and also Logan Paul to spend untold amounts of money on. That captivation continues because The Pokémon Company is collaborating with Japanese artist Yu Nagaba on a new line of Eeveelution cards, and they’re really cool.
If you’re unfamiliar with Nagaba’s work, he’s known for his minimalistic style that kinda feels evocative of newspaper comics. He’s collaborated with Pokémon before on things like a 2021 Pikachu card and Ed Sheeran’s “Celestial” music video. This new collaboration is a box set featuring art of Eevee and all its evolutions. It will launch in Japan on May 24 and run 4800 yen (roughly $36 USD) . It includes a rubber playmat, sleeves for cards, and a deck box. Right now, the set is part of a lottery on the Japanese Pokémon Center site. On top of the box set, Nagaba’s art also appears on a portfolio and card display frame, which will run 1980 yen (about $15 USD) and 1490 yen (around $11 USD), respectively.
Once May 24 comes around, the Pokémon Center will include a promo card of the Eeveelutions for every 1000 yen spent on a TCG-related purchase. This announcement precedes another announcement that will take place on May 5, revealing more information about a collaboration between Nagaba, Pokémon, and the clothing brand BEAMS. Thanks to PokéBeach for the translations.
Now that I’m looking at all these Eeveelution pieces, I just want to see all my favorites in Nagaba’s style. This is prime minimalist tattoo fodder. Give me Raichu, Nagaba, I’ll get him inked into my arm forever.
Let’s take a look at all the cards and merch Nagaba drew up for the collection.
Welcome to Exp. Share, Kotaku’s weekly Pokémon column in which we dive deep to explore notable characters, urban legends, communities, and just plain weird quirks from throughout the Pokémon franchise. This week, we’re looking at how Spinda, an unassuming critter from Generation III, went from a novelty to an apparent nuisance for The Pokémon Company to work with because of its multiple forms.
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27 years after Pokémon Red and Green, alternate forms and designs in Pokémon have become a mainstay in the series. From Shiny Pokémon to event ‘mons like the spiky-eared Pichu, most Pokémon can look a little bit different from their original versions. However, there is one Pokémon that has more forms than any other one else in the series, and that’s Spinda. Because of how its designed is determined, it can have somewhere around four billion different forms.
Spinda is a normal-type Pokémon introduced in Ruby and Sapphire for the Game Boy Advance. While the swirly-eyed little bear seems mostly unremarkable on the surface, it has a gimmick in its appearance that’s resulted in its own a cult following within the Pokémon community. The character has a spot pattern on its coat that, similar to shiny odds, is entirely determined by background math that can give it up to four billion possible variations. It’s a mainstay of its Pokédex entries across the games, with several saying that no two Spinda have the same spot patterns.
How does Spinda have so many forms?
Spinda’s appearance is determined by its individual personality value, or encryption constant in more recent entries, which is a 32-bit integer ranging from zero to 4,294,967,295. This number is assigned the first time you meet a Pokémon in a save file, and where it lands determines the placement of its spots, as well as other things like gender and nature. On top of this, each of these variations could be Shiny, doubling its variations. This is a neat idea that has helped Spinda stand out among its third-generation contemporaries and has made it a centerpiece in its own Pokémon community.
Because Spinda’s possible forms are so vast, communities such as the Spinda’s Cafe subreddit are dedicated to documenting every variation of its spot pattern. There’s even an in-browser app called Spinda Painter that lets you test different personality values and shiny possibilities to see the resulting spot patterns. While it’s a strictly cosmetic change, it’s the closest Pokémon has ever gotten to replicating how different real-world animal fur patterns can look from one another.
Image: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
How has this affected Spinda in recent games?
But that variation is why Spinda has been an issue for Game Freak and The Pokémon Company in terms of transferring the character and all its variants to future games. Pokémon Home, the app players use to transfer and store Pokémon between games, can’t transfer Spinda to and from Pokémon Go or Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl remakes because they’re inconsistent with how other games determine the character’s spot pattern. Pokémon Go only has nine predetermined patterns rather than the several billion found in most games, and the Diamond and Pearl remakes have a glitch associated with how it reads the numbers that determine Spinda’s forms. This means that the value these games assign to Spinda could result in a completely different spot pattern being assigned to the same Pokémon. As a result, Spinda is the only Pokémon obtainable in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl that can’t be transferred to and from these games.
While it’s unclear if these billions of possible designs are responsible, Spinda has notably not been obtainable in a new game since Game Freak retired the National Dex that allows players to transfer any and all old Pokémon to new games. Spinda was conspicuously absent from Sword and Shield and Scarlet and Violet. Given that The Pokémon Company is running into compatibility issues with Spinda on several fronts, it will be interesting to see if Spinda appears in a mainline Pokémon game ever again. But even if the dizzy bear doesn’t show up in a new Pokémon game any time soon, at least there are corners of the Pokémon fandom that are taking steps to ensure what makes it special isn’t forgotten.
The Pokémon Company will print its first new Kadabra card in over 20 years. According to a report by PokéBeach, the Pokemon Card 151 set due out in June will feature the psychic spoon-bender alongside the series other original Pokémon, something that would have previously been blocked by illusionist Uri Geller’s lawsuit accusing Kadabra of being based on his own likeness.
PokéBeach (via IGN) said it was able to confirm Kadabra’s return after viewing a leaked sell sheet for the upcoming set. While on its face it seems obvious that number 64 would be included along with the 151 other original Pokémon, Kadabra has been excluded from the card game since the early 2000s. That’s when Geller, best known for performing conjuring tricks ostensibly revolving around physic abilities, such as bending spoons, first discovered Kadabra and tried to take Nintendo to court over the Pokémon’s similarities to his act.
While the most obvious example was Kadabra’s signature bent spoon, its name in Japanese, Yungerer, also bore clear similarities. Geller reportedly took special issue with the Team Rocket Kadabra card which featured “Evil Yungerer.”
“I’m very angry about this,” he told the BBC back in 2000. “I wouldn’t have given permission for an aggressive, and in one case evil character to be based on me. This is not even anything to do with the old question of if I’m a magician or a real psychic. It’s straight theft of my persona.”
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Geller didn’t stay angry though. Following years of failed lawsuits, pleas from fans, and even his own granddaughters, he eventually relented. In 2020 he sent a letter to Nintendo giving permission for Kadabra to continue being used. Pokémon company CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara wrote back at the time to thank him. Geller even started teasing Kadabra’s possible return to the card game last year.
“Look, I want to thank the Pokémon fans who reached out to me over the last [few] years,” he told PokéBeach in a voicemail yesterday. “Including the ones from PokéBeach, who kept contacting me nonstop. So basically, it was you and my granddaughters that got me to change my mind.”
The illusionist went on:
Now we can all see Kadabra reunited with the original Pokémon in the card game this summer. I love you all. And I admit, totally open and honest. I was a fool. It was a devastating mistake for me to sue Pokémon. [Kadabra] was basically a tribute to Uri Geller. But it’s back now. Forgive me. I love you all. Much love and energy.
Most of us have only heard Pikachu, the lovable mascot of the all-ages multimedia franchise Pokémon, say his name when he speaks through the anime. Although, there was that time he spoke real human words to his trainer Ash Ketchum in the Pokémon: I Choose You movie, and when Ryan Reynolds gave him a new, English-speaking voice in Detective Pikachu. But most of the time, all he ever says is variations on his name. Well, today, he got to say “motherfucking,” in an officially published TikTok from the Japanese branch of The Pokémon Company. You heard it here, folks: Pikachu is a potty mouth like the rest of us.
The video, which has since been deleted from the Japanese Pokémon TikTok account, was set to an audio by user Andy Arthur Smith in which he sings an embellished version of “If You’re Happy And You Know It”. The new lyrics to the children’s song, as performed by Smith, go a little something like, “If you’re fucking happy and you motherfucking know it clap your motherfucking hands.” As a Japanese brand account, it stands to reason the people running it might not be native English speakers and didn’t know the explicit nature of the song until it was pointed out to them, and that once it was, the video was promptly removed from the account.
However, no delete button can stop the internet, which never forgets, so Pikachu singing “if you’re fucking happy and you motherfucking know it, clap your motherfucking hands” in official marketing material is still floating around social media.
All jokes aside, this isn’t the first time Pikachu has cussed in an official capacity. In the Detective Pikachu movie, the electric mouse said “hell” and “damn” in the voice of Ryan Reynolds. Sure, on a list ranking the severity of different profanity, those are much lower on the list, but perhaps when we heard Pikachu saying his name, he has always been swearing at people.
