Dark side of the Moon

If the nuances of an ostensibly simple battle system encourage older players to spend dozens of hours hunting, training and finessing a six-monster team for competitive play, part of Pokémon’s crossover appeal is surely down to its willingness to probe the murkier corners of each region’s ecosystems. This might be chance encounters with spectral presences or other eerily unexplained mysteries, but more often the darkness is found within the Pokédex. In earlier generations, we had Drowzee eating the dreams of children, and Cubone wearing the skull of its dead mother, while the fifth generation’s Lampent is said to hang around hospitals, waiting to steal the souls of the recently deceased to power its flame. and

will maintain that great tradition, mixing the mournful with the truly disturbing. Mimikyu, for example, is a lonely Pokémon that hides under a cloth painted to look like Pikachu as an attempt to befriend humans. Haunted sandcastle Palossand, meanwhile, sounds ridiculous in concept, but it’s capable of swallowing up smaller Pokémon – handily illustrated by a piece of art that shows Pikachu being dragged to his death. It’s a surprising way to treat the series’ mascot (you can’t imagine Nintendo releasing images of Mario’s corpse) and suggests a desire to shake things up a bit for the seventh-generation games.