Pokémon Bank Update Adds Support for Pokémon Sun & Moon

I've been waiting for this... :v

YES, at last Gen 7 can begin!

FINALLY!

"Praise Helix"? Wow, that's a blast from the past...

Finally good news.
But on the bad news, here's somethings people should know.
Glitch Mew & MissingNo. aren't transferable.
No national dex for Sun & Moon.
& that guy in the Desert asking to see a Solrock or Lunatone is just Mr. Bonding.(The pink suit guy who did O powers in Gen6)

@Decapre What!? Noooo! You're kidding me! That's it!?

@AlexOlney Aside from GSC, you can trade Pokemon from the original EVERYTHING.

Madness indeed.

Although I suppose they're not the ORIGINAL original RBYG games, and their route into SuMo isn't quite as fantastically, painstakingly circuitous as from the original RSE.

It's funny to think that some of the Pokémon making their way into the latest generation will have outlived many family pets...

Thank goodness! Can't wait to get everything across.

@Decapre I'm actually happy with not being able to trade glitched pokémon across. Surprised they didn't get around to closing those glitches when porting the game to the VC... I remember a friend having to restart his game because he'd used the Missingno. glitch and it disqualified him from official tournaments.

It's a lot of effort though! Moving Pokémon to transporter, then to sun and moon!!! Done now but, meh, so barbaric

@AlexOlney how does this work?

I remember when you could transfer Pokemon to new games for free.

@AlexOlney I'll settle with ORAS. My Pokemon future promises quite enough hoops with HeartGold. :V

@Decapre Mew not transferable? Odd. So the national pokedex has retconned the first set to 150? Or is the app just made aware that with the original promo events long gone, there's no way in hell for Mew to be present normally in a Virtual Console game?

@DanteSolablood Those games have a really convoluted and not so well written code (that's why RGBY are glitch infested games), written in assembly language. I bet no one even dared look inside (separately for every language version) because 1. it would be too costy and b. the game may as well break up.
Or... from marketing side: they wanted to provide the realistic experience
I'm fine with glitched Mew being banned, although I would like to get some kind of easter egg with MissingNo. xD

And so the unfortunate Waiting For The Bank saga ends. Here are all the logs (with in each one's title a link to the article it was first posted in, should you need it for some reason), so you can enjoy this nice alternate reality game I played so far. The sequel will come the day a later game will come out, inevitably missing Bank compatibility until months later in its lifespan. Hey, it happened with X and Y, it happened again with Sun and Moon, I guess Bank delays will be something trainers will have to deal with until they eventually quit Pokémon altogether.

Trainer's Log, day 84

"Our trip to Alola is starting to take its toll on my fellow comrades. They came here when the closed banks in Greece caused a mass hysteria in their homeland, and they thought they could find some solace in this archipelago. They were wrong.
Steve was the first to resort to cannibalism this morning. He was eating - eating, I say - his own Cubone. We thought this horrific stuff was best left in the first Resident Evil scene, but somehow he ended up reenacting the first zombie encounter from that game. He turned around slowly, his mouth filled with blood, muttering something about "the Bank". Whether he referred to his homeland's banks or some other bank is unclear. The Cubone is alright, however. The poor thing merely evolved. Might have something to do with the fact it was killed and roasted, therefore gaining Ghost and Fire types respectively. Beats me.
Anyway, I hope this "Bank" comes soon, because the nostalgia for my comrades' older Pokémon teams is causing a viral outbreak. I don't know how long I will go on before eventually falling prey to this awful disease. Should I ever die while on these islands, tell my wife I love her. And call her child Cubone, in memory of our first victim. Or, rather, don't, because that would imply a rather nasty demise for my loved one."

Trainer's Log, day 92

"Steve is officially off the deep end. After his first delirious fit, he started rambling about that Bank from earlier, once again. He saw an Alolan Exeggutor and started screaming, while holding his head. We were ready this time and we sedated him with all the tranquilizers we had. I couldn't clearly understand his words, but it sounded like he was trying to say that Alolan Exeggutors just look like regular palm trees, and that a real Exeggutor is supposed to be plump.
His cold sweating couldn't stop, and a local expert, who doesn't wear anything under his lab coat for some reason, said that state of nostalgia was terminal and the Bank he was waiting for wouldn't arrive in time. We were given a choice, either let him live his final days in agony or spare him the pain by giving him euthanasia. After a heated debate, we ultimately chose the latter would be for the better.
Steve couldn't breathe normally anymore, so we thought he could go at least out with a smile and chose to dress up our Salamence (thank Arceus they have the Bagon line here) as a Charizard, or as Steve said, "a non-teasing, rideable, actual Charizard". We said that Charizard would give him mouth-to-mouth and he said with a tearful smile "the Bank came, it came at last". Those were his final words before Salamence gave him a mouth-to-mouth, which equaled a Dragon Breath attack down his throat. The funerals will be held next Sunday.
I also punched our Kanto-born Meowth in a fit of rage this morning, although I immediately apologized to it. Thankfully Pokémon are loyal, trustful partners, and as such our poor pet understood. I believe I'm in the first stage of whatever caused Steve his untimely demise. I just bank the want to come here, I mean, I just want the Bank to come here. Here bank bank, I want the bank. Bank? Bank."

Trainer's Log, day 93

"The bank still hasn't come. Steve is dead. Hank chased a non-Alolan Geodude down a cliff. And for some reason now I really want a bank. Bank the bank to me. I can't deal with this anymore. I hallucinated a wild Articuno right now and when it all ended all I knew was that I threw a Master Ball at a common Zigzagoon. At least I thought it was a Zigzagoon but that was a hallucination too, as it was a purple Rattata. And then that was a hallucination as it was a normal Yungoos. Bank me the give.
I have no regrets. Darkrai, use Dark Void on me. Be my demise. I don't want to live anymore
Bank bank bank baknkeak beaknakecaava"

Trainer's Log, day 94

"I'll be taking over writing duties after the previous author of these journals fell to this weird plague. As a native Alolan, I'm immune to this wave of viral nostalgia. Nonetheless, this group of trainers appears to come from other regions, which is why I suspect the "bank" they allude to is actually the Pokémon Bank. Personally, I've developed a soft spot for our variants of Kanto-born Pokémon, but the arrival of specimen from other regions doesn't worry me on an environmental level as they won't affect the local wildlife. Personally, I hope a Dialga becomes available, in order to distort time in order to save the lives of Greek trainers Steve and Hank, but that's a long shot. As for the schmuck who used to write these logs, we found a way to bring him to Aether Paradise, where we froze him in place alongside the Pokémon showcased there. Thankfully luring him there hasn't been hard at all, as all we had to do was telling him the bank he was looking for was there. My Ninetales did the rest.
I'll keep track of any noteworthy events within the following days as they unfold."

And now, the ending.

Trainer's log, day 96

"The Pokémon Bank has finally arrived, and the frozen trainer has thawed out of the ice. By my other Ninetales (I own one of each type). Accessing the Bank is proving to be troublesome at the time of writing, but server issues aside, non-Alolan trainers are finally being given back their precious, older Pokémon they know and love.
Sadly, the previous writer's initial tears of joy turned into tears of sorrow upon learning of his fallen comrades, but I offered him to ask his Dialga to send us back in time, after telling him there was no guarantee of success. He agreed, but most unexpectedly, Dialga itself agreed too. We went back in time a few days, and to prove other trainers we weren't lying, we gave away some common Pokémon from other regions - Zigzagoons, Patrats, Bidoofs, and so on. Sadly, we also gave away a few starters via Wonder Trade by complete accident. Now the timeline is corrupted, showing signs as things that just should not be - namely, temporal paradoxes, several Dialgas appearing in different locations without actually being there, duplicates of people, laws of physics sometimes messing up, and worst of all, trainers giving away Kanto starters by asking for legendary Pokémon via pre-Bank Alolan GTS. Other than that, we managed to save the other two trainers by also showing them the older Pokémon they know and love.
Now with this bad accident out of the way, all that's left to do is to wonder why I do remember the events as I did, given tampering with time should also have erased my memories of them. Why does Steve own both incarnations of his Pokémon, both as a Cubone and as a Marowak? Why, come to think of it, do I even own the previous logs? It is my duty, as an undercover officer working for Looker, to investigate these events. Naturally, I will keep this last log entry to myself, and will give Steve other logs more consistent with the current timeline. Agent Lewis Eisenhardt XIII out."

Seriously, though, any time the Bank comes late, people on GTS ask for legendaries whenever they put a slightly-rarer-than-a-Bidoof Pokémon online. Thankfully that tyranny is now over.

If they want to delay when you can import Pokemon, why didn't they make it so Pokemon Sun and Moon can't use the Pokemon Bank until the player has completed the main game?

@AlexOlney I would imagine you would have to trade/transfer from GBA Ruby and Sapphire to a Gen IV DS game then trade/transfer to a Gen V DS game. The Gen V games can use the Poke Bank so then you'd have to just upload them to the Poke Bank and move them over to your copy of Sun or Moon.

@RainbowGazelle It's 5€ a year... If you are able to afford video games, surely you have enough money to keep their servers up. People waste their money in more pointless stuff everyday.

@KTT Well, a lot of early games had glitches & shortcuts in that were never meant to be found. Plus Gamefreak was pretty small until the Pokémon boom... indies normally get a pass on bigs right?

@RainbowGazelle I remember when features were removed when they started to cost too much. You could always open a rival server to host hundreds of thousands of Pokémon players for free?

@nhSnork National Dex never needed Event pokemon to become completed. Pokemon Bank now serves as National Dex. I belive that Japanese event Mew and UK Mew will be transferable.

@RainbowGazelle I can hardly call spedning ~200bucks on a second system (and a some sort of trading device before Wireless became common) a free service.
Not to mention annoying minigames and a transfer limit.

@KTT Lol, I'm lucky I never had to buy a second system... but you have a good point. If anything the GTS & Bank service has cut the price of completing the pokédex by around £40-£240 for some people.

@DanteSolablood Yeah, when you are a lone poke fan, it's a pain to complete the dex.
Seriously, $5 per year is like 42 cents monthly. I call that a deal. Bank is not perfect but I'm happy with it.

@KTT Well let me know what you need, I've got a pretty comprehensive living pokédex up to Gen 6, taking a break on Gen 7 to create a 6IV team. Got all the Moon version exclusives (and some spare legendaries) on GTS by trading Dewpiders.

@Franklin
That would have made so much sense.
Which is why they didn't do it.

@DanteSolablood Thanks, but no worries!
I'm experienced GTS trader. Got the full Alolan living Dex a quite while ago

@Maxz Forget family pets, I have Pokemon older than my ten year old son, who I regularly play Pokemon with. They've been transferred all the way up from Leaf Green with each new generation.

Now plllllllzzzzzz give us the Gen II games, Game Freak!!!

I'll buy all three. Combined, that's close to the price of a full retail 3DS game.....

@NickOfTime90 Well it is a ride:
You need a 'phat' NDS for the first transfer (it has GBA slot). When you are far enough, you access Pal Park in gen 4, where you can move 6 pokes from GBA in a catching game.

Then, you need another DS/3DS system with BW. At the end of the game you find a lab which uses Poke Transfer. By using Download Play, you move 6 pokes from gen 4 to 5th. You re-obtain them in a shooting game.

Finally, you place your pokes to the first box in BW games. You put the cart into 3DS where you have Poke Transporter and Poke Bank downloaded. By using the Transporter you remove your pokes from BW into Transport Box.

And then, from Poke Bank, you can move them to your ORAS/XY/SuMo!

Kinda glad that there's no national as I still haven't gotten the shiny charm yet and was scared id need to put in loads more work if I delayed till now

Lots of cool stuff to transfer in from 6th gen, but I think I'm most excited for the RBY Pokémon. I love that their IVs are so good and they're blank slates to EV train right when transferred over.

Now Nintendo needs to remind you when your year is almost up. I have no concept of time, so my year was up and I lost all my Pokemon.

@KTT yeah thats quite the ride! Thanks for explaining

Glad this is finally live but I'm a little disappointed that there's no National Dex in Sun and Moon. Sure, I can check it in Bank, but I'm not always connected to the Internet.

I was looking forward to being able to register all these new pokemon in a pokedex in my copy of Sun, to read all the descriptions, and browse the variants. I'm really disappointed we can't do that in the new game, and have to rely on going in to Pokemon Bank each time to check our progress with the national pokedex.

In any case, I'm now in the progress of transferring my pokemon over to Pokemon Sun - but not before cataloguing all the ones I am yet to get in X, and which ones I may need to trade for.

Yay, it's great to finally have Bank available for 7th Gen. I wanted to complete my 6th gen Pokedex before transferring Pokemon to Moon, so I'm not going to make use of Bank straight away.

Lack of National Pokedex is disappointing. I hope they patch it into Sun and Moon, though I doubt that'll happen.

Well its about time, now I can play the real game.

I just find the lack of an in game National Dex to be an odd decision and rather disappointing. I mean, they refer to other regions and Pokemon not from the Alola region. But no National Pokedex?

Took them long enough, I miss my shiny Vulpix.

On closer inspection, the Bank pokedex includes the descriptive entries for pokemon as they appear in X/Y, Ruby/Sapphire and Sun/Moon, where applicable, as well as all variants (including shiny forms).

No thanks, I want to keep my Pokémon in the home they're supposed to live in.

This'll keep my son busy when he gets home from school....

Finally time to transfer my 200+ shinies. Yeah, I abused XY's good ol Clone Trade glitch quite a lot last gen and basically opened up my 'Shiny Shop' every evening after an afternoon of glitching trades with myself.

For the record, you DO NOT need to pay for Pokémon Bank to use the National Pokédex.

Finally. Wish they also patched in the National Pokédex and the missing Mega Stones, but can't win them all. Especially with Game Freak. I'll take what I can get. Now to Hyper Train some legendaries and shinies...

I'm baffled at the missing national dex IN GAME. It is just stupid to have the bank to access it and even then it doesn't even have flavor text.

I mean what's the point then? Isn't catch em all the ultimate Pokemon goal? I can't believe they screwed an otherwise good game like this, though I'm finding more baffling the people who are either giving GF a pass on this or that are actively defending it with insanse justifications.

@RainbowGazelle How is requiring you have a second system and a device in which to transfer the pokemon(link cable, that weird semi-circle attachment, etc) considered free?

So we have no sign of the remaining mega stones, there is barely enough space for a living dex leaving only 5 boxes, and for some reason no natdex?
Weird

@Arcamenel
Because prior to the internet gen, you weren't even supposed to be playing the games alone - you were supposed to play with your friend(s)/siblings/significant other who got other versions, so that you could "catch them all". No sane person went out and bought another console to trade with themselves, certainly not anyone who is complaining about a £4.49 fee.

It never cost me a penny extra because I'd already have link cables to play games with friends (including pokemon for battles!), and we'd just let the others use our systems to transfer...

@Kmno The bank does have the text. I find it strange that the non-native Pokemon have no dex number or description in game though.

But I also appreciate not making people have to get 800 Pokemon to complete the pokedex and get the shiny charm, it was too overwhelming for many players. This is the first time I've ever bothered to complete the Pokedex. I now have more play time in Sun than in AS or X even though I've had them for years.

@sillygostly I'd rather have a Bank compatable VC release of HeartGold and SoulSilver, which are the superior games in every way but are almost impossible to find nowadays without paying a mint on e-Bay.

@BulbasaurusRex : It's technically "compatible", if you can be bothered transferring them to a Gen V game and then via the Poké Transporter app, but unfortunately Surfing/Flying Pikachu are unable to make the transition to future generation games (and I had caught quite a few of them too).

While HG/SS may be technically superior, I have a huge soft spot for the original GBC games that the DS remakes cannot match. They're terrific and all, but I still want the option to be able to play the originals on 3DS.

@sillygostly Yes, but I'm talking about a potential Virtual Console rerelease of HG/SS on Wii U or Switch. They would have to be made Bank compatible on their own (by somehow connecting to the Bank app on 3DS or a new Switch version of the app), since you wouldn't be able to transfer from digital versions of the games to the 5th generation games via the existing method.

Well, enjoy dreaming for your rose-tinted nostalgia with outdated presentation and game mechanics (where about half the custom Pokéballs don't even work right). I'll enjoy the definitive version that is already available right now on my 3DS just as soon as I can actually find a decently priced copy.

@Paddle1 If people are using Pokemon Bank and its National Dex to complete it, I'm not sure how that's any different than having the actual Dex in the game. The whole thing, when you really look at it, makes no sense. You are asking the players to have to leave the game and open up a whole new app to look at something that was normally included in the game itself? For me, the whole idea that I have to do that, coupled with using a bunch of Pokemon who don't seem to be recognized in the game really takes you out of the moment. Its really a buzzkill. Ultimately, its not entirely a dealbreaker. But its like they went to solve a problem that really didn't exist.

@Paddle1 They could just change things and only ask for the regional dex (like they did) and still leave alone the national one. I'm really really baffled that you or anyone can justify the removal of something that was a stapple of the series just because of one item that you can still get now more easily.

@Kmno I'm not, just looking on the bright side. Collecting 719 Pokemon was not as realistic for many as 301. What they should've done was make the national dex optional and only require completing regional for the shiny charm. I do wish the entries for the other Pokemon were included.

How is Pokemon bank gonna give me a mewnium z but no way to get a mew. I just missed the mew event for oras when I bought the games and there's no way to look for mew through the gts either. Hopefully there's a mew event for sun and moon in the not too distant future.