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In Pokémon Sword and Shield, the Galar region will not give players access to all the previous Pokémon in the series.
The new region, which is based on England, will have a spread of Pokémon from across numerous prior series entries, but won't allow players to import all of them via Pokémon Home/Pokémon Bank service.
The decision stems from graphics and animation, this being a fully 3D Pokémon game on new hardware and in a new engine.
On a Nintendo Treehouse stream during E3 2019 (via Eurogamer), Junichi Masuda explained, 'In previous games that worked with Pokémon Bank service, you were able – for example on Sun and Moon – bring over all Pokemon even if they weren't in the Alola Pokédex. But with the transition to the Nintendo Switch hardware, being much more powerful and allowing us to be a lot more expressive with each of the individual Pokémon.'
Masuda then went on to clarify that the development time for Sword and Shield wouldn't be sufficient to incorporate all previous Pokémon:
'Now we're well over 800 Pokemon species in the games, at Game Freak we really spent a lot of time thinking about what the best way to move forward was – really preserving the quality of all the different Pokemon, while also taking into account the battle balance of having so many different Pokemon available, all within a limited development time so we don't make fans wait too long for every new entry in the series.'
Pokemon Sword and Shield are out on November 15, 2019 for the Nintendo Switch.
