Detective Pikachu sequel coming to Nintendo Switch

The Pokémon Company has announced a number of new titles for Nintendo Switch, Android and iOS, including a sequel to 2016’s Detective Pikachu.

In a press conference in Tokyo on Wednesday, Pokémon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara confirmed that the sequel, which is in development for Nintendo Switch at Pokémon series collaborator Creatures Inc, will continue the story of the original 3DS game.

Also coming to Nintendo Switch and smartphones is Pokémon Home, a new cloud service app that will enable players to manage their Pokémon collection across multiple games. Home connects with Pokémon Bank, as well as Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee, Pokémon Go and the upcoming Sword and Shield.

For mobile, the firm announced Pokémon Masters from Super Mario Run developer DeNA. Pokémon Masters is described as “a casual but uniquely Pokémon experience” featuring many famous Pokémon Trainers from the long history of Pokémon video games. More information will be released in June.

Meanwhile, Pokémon Sleep is a mobile app which is said to “turn sleeping into entertainment” by having a player’s time spent sleeping and the time they wake up have an effect on the gameplay.

The app will launch in 2020 with a new peripheral, Pokémon Go Plus +, which includes an embedded accelerometer to track a user’s time sleeping and send this information to their smartphone via Bluetooth. This new device also has the same functions as the original Pokémon Go Plus.

The Pokémon Company also confirmed it’s working with Chinese company NetEase to bring more games to the country. Since its announcement in May, over 1.7 million players have pre-registered to play an enhanced version of Pokémon Quest featuring player-versus-player and social features.

The entire Pokémon Company conference can be viewed again via the video on this page.

Nintendo is to host a Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield Nintendo Direct broadcast on Wednesday June 5.

In further Pokémon news, main series developer Game Freak Pokémon is increasingly prioritising original game creation in order to grow the experience of its staff, programmer and director Masayuki Onoue told VGC earlier this month.