Three reasons why Pokémon Sword and Shield might not become a good competitive title

There’s no doubt that Pokémon Sword and Shield will one day become the new face of the Pokémon competitive scene.

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company will want to move on from Pokémon Ultra Sun and Moon after its lengthy competitive life system to bring the Switch title into the limelight, even if it’s not for a year or two.

Related: Dynamax should be banned from competitive play in Pokémon Sword and Shield

But we don’t think it’s a good idea to make Sword and Shield a competitive title anytime soon based on the information we have about the game right now. There are far too many question marks about the title’s mechanics and features that cause us to worry about its competitive viability and some decisions by Game Freak have been questionable at best.

Here are a few reasons why we think it might be best to wait on immediately making Sword and Shield the next competitive Pokémon title.

Lack of Cloud Saves

The first and most obvious reason for our worries about the next Pokémon game is the lack of a Cloud Save function for the core RPG titles.

In previous games, your Pokémon and progress were always saved onto your Nintendo 3DS cartridge and were pretty safe (for the most part). But that’s changed with the Nintendo Switch.

Game files are now saved on the system, and if that system breaks for whatever reason, then the file and all your Pokémon will be gone along with it. A simple issue could delete hours of save files and make a team you might have spent thousands of hours on vanish in an instant.

No National Dex

The lack of a National Dex restricts the amount of Pokémon that can be added to the competitive scene in the future and will make the metagame feel very stale. The only way to fix the issue would be to bring out in-game patches or add the National Dex in the future. But, for now, it doesn’t look great.

We’ve written about the National Dex debate a few times now and won’t rewrite what we’ve already discussed in great detail, but many players aren’t happy that there won’t be a National Dex in Pokémon Sword and Shield.

HOME is not the answer

Pokémon HOME is a new mobile application where players can buy subscriptions to save their Pokémon from various games, including Sword and Shield, in online cloud save boxes.

The theory is that Pokémon added into the game can be transferred into Sword and Shield and back to HOME in order to keep them safe. But this isn’t an ideal situation.

Due to the removal of the national Pokédex, some Pokémon that are put into HOME will effectively be trapped in the mobile app until Game Freak creates a game that those Pokémon can be transferred into.

This effectively makes the app more like a prison than a HOME since some of your best competitive Pokémon from recent years might be trapped on your devices, never to be used again until Game Freak introduces the National Dex or makes another title.