Why there won’t be another Pokémon Stadium

Have you ever wanted to switch on your Wii U and boot up another Pokémon Stadium? The problem when it came to being a Pokémon kid back in the late 90’s was that when you wanted to play a videogame, you were limited to playing the red/blue/yellow game on the Game Boy. Don’t get me wrong, the game was great, we all had a blast catching Pokémon, trading them and grinding them all the way to level 100. The problem with it was that the game looked terrible in many cases you could barely make out what the pokemon you were looking at was supposed to be like.

Mew.

Mankey.

Omastar.

You get the point.

So when we got to play with the Pokémon that we raised in Pokémon Stadium for the N64 for the first time, we were speechless. It was such a foreign idea to see them rendered like that, they even looked like the original drawings made by Ken Sugimori! You could even play the games on the big screen, without having to worry about spending all your money on batteries.

Now, you see those two selling points I mentioned above? That’s why we bought Pokémon Stadium. It didn’t have a full RPG adventure and it didn’t really offer anything else. Now, when you take those two points and analyse them with regards to Pokémon X and Y, you’ll see that they don’t really apply. They have 3D graphics (both poligonal and stereoscopic) and your 3DS has a rechargable lithium battery so it renders those points moot.

Junichi Masuda on why there won’t be another Pokémon Stadium game

It kind of goes back to the core philosophy of Pokémon as a brand: We really want to excite people and surprise them with new things they weren’t expecting. The original games, of course, were 2D and in black and white, and seeing them in 3D was a stark contrast… it was kind of a huge surprise for players. Nowadays, the Pokémon are already in 3D, and I’m not sure that better graphics would be quite as impactful or impressive. So in order to come back to the Stadium series, I think we’d need to have some sort of new invention to justify it.

And there you have it. There wouldn’t be a reason to have another Stadium game since all the benefits that they provided can be done in the core game itself. Even other things like the Pokémon Academy is useless with mobile internet. Now the games even have most of the move and location data in the games themselves. This means that all that’s left that give the Stadium games their uniqueness compared to X/Y are the minigames, which are covered in all the spinoff Pokémon games.

Chances are that you’ll have to stick to the N64 for your Stadium fix.

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