Gallery: Game Freak Has Moved In With Nintendo, And The New Offices Look Sublime

wooooooooooooooooooow

It looks a bit soulless to me. (And if those plants are plastic ugh.)

Really it could be any reasonably well heeled company office. Bizarre that it doesn't look like a games company office at all. Don't they like their own games?

So... does this mean the next games will be good?

We can only hope that Nintendo will force some improvements to these games, meeting the Nintendo standards once again.

Hopefully this means that Nintendo will help them out to make sure that the Pokemon games meat the typical Nintendo standard

Are those real or just CGI mockups? (because to me they definitely look like CGI mockups)

Guest : Excuse me, sir. Where is the toilet ?
Gamefreak staff : Oh, just go past the Cerulean City room, through the Charizard doors and you will find the toilet.
Guest : ???

It's all computer graphics for now. And especially in this picture with the plants on the table — if they want to talk to each other, do they have access to a machete?

Game Freak is going to be that one roommate that is incredibly lazy and gets nothing done.

@Musharna,

We have been waiting for you to come out with this, you did not let us down.

Pokemon comment sections on this site are like broken records

Nicer than any office I’ve worked in, that’s for sure

So this means they’re actually going to start treating Pokémon like the AAA franchise it’s been for decades, right?

So now that they've moved in with Nintendo, is Nintendo actually going to make sure that Game Freak actually puts proper time and effort into the games? Nintendo can't be happy with how the games have been treated lately.

If only they cared about the Pokemon Franchise half as much as these offices.

@MajinSoul Just like Pokemon itself. Maybe if Game Freak actually gave the games the time and resources befitting of a major IP on a console, there'd be less complaining about the state of the franchise.

@Anti-Matter here's a flashlight - you need to go through the rock tunnel

Hold it!!!!!
Does that mean an accusation?
Cause if so.... this is really big news!

Those are some nice offices! People saying they look bland? I wish my office looked half as nice as this! What do you all work for google or something??

The CDC will have a field day with all the violations! I don't see any social distancing markers, plexiglass, or chairs 6ft apart

For a second I thought Nintendo had acquired game freak. I thought wrong.

Just give us Gold and Silver remakes you cowards..

I was going to make a snide remark about Nintendo keeping a much closer eye on the quality control of Pokémon games because of this, but you guys in the comments have me covered 😂

That's a pretty nifty thematic direction to go when you got the money and the lagacy for it. :3

Helps that your old boss is now the president of Nintendo, I guess. ^^

If this means diamond and pearl remakes then yay

@RustedHero I don't think the offices will be used now

I hear ‘rooms with chairs’ is very in vogue.

Now that they had their own spaces with Nintendo, hopefully they gave us a follow-up to Tembo the Badass Elephant, Drill Dozer, and Pulseman. Three of their best games out there that are not Yoshi and Pokemon.

Let’s hope Nintendo fixes the deep issues within this company.

So will this mean better Poke games? or... am i growling at the wrong mon?

No one cares about Kanto more than Game Freak. They just can't get over a 20-year old game, and that shows in SWSH's antiquated design. Give Pokemon to Monolith Soft or another developer that is willing to take risks and modernize the series.

How awkward will it be the next time GameFreak develops a game for other consoles that skips Nintendo's? Anyone remember Tembo the Badass Elephant?

People have said that Pokémon games have been bad recently but the only Pokémon games I've played in the last three or four years has been sun(With litten as my starter) it was like a (8.8/10) and like 45% of Shield(With grookey as my starter) it was like a (7/10)

Last I checked, Game Freak was not owned by Nintendo; they're independent. For example, they made Tembo the Elephant, a few years ago, and released it on PS4, XBO, PC, but not Wii U.

I am just sitting here as someone who thinks SuMo was a horrible gen and was happy to see them return to form with Sword and Shield,
reading comments, just thinking "wha...?".

Not that this is anything new to me, nor this being anything unexpected, considering how unreasonably high expectations were for this gen.

So where are all the computers? These look like all conference rooms. Do they even program anymore?

@Kirgo expectations were at an 11... and they delivered a 4.

You just gotta play, I don’t know, something like Xenoblade to see how environment and world design works.... or any other Pokémon game for good progression rules.

SW/SH were a mess in all departments

Cool until your roommates start being too loud and blast Pokémon 90s theme song on repeat.

The fact that their logo still gives me the chills because it was always the first thing you saw when you booted up the old games ... I miss the way Pokémon made me feel.

"Rooms are based off kanto locations"
Oooooof course they are

@fafonio
To me, these games made a lot of things better than previous gens.
The arenas and the league at the end, for example, were just infinitly better in presentation then in any previous gen.

Apart from that the game is just nothing special, but that was to be expected. SuMo tried to overhaul a lot of things, but most changes ended up worsening the game for a lot of people.
What do you do in a situation like that? For at least the next game you play it save and go back to the basics, thats what they did.
And they still tried a lot of, not so important, new things, like the wild area.

It is entirely possible, that they want to expand on such things in the next game, but playing it safe for now was the right business decision and it seems like it worked as well.

And I disagree, expectations were not at 11, they were at 15/10 at least. I and some others were already arguing about ridiculous expectations long before the SW/SH were officially announced.
Fans basically expected they throw away absolutely everything to make a botw of the Pokemon universe. Do I really have to remind people what an exceptional game botw was? To expect any company to just do something similar as if that were easy is unfair at best.

i dont know guys , i have a feeling this wont affect the games whatsoever

Game Freak needs to stop pandering to Gen 1; this is incredibly disappointing! They should've based all the meeting rooms on Pokemon Sleep or something because meetings are boring

i really don't care but the new office looks slick

What's special about them? They look pretty standard to me

Nintendo Life has an ad on this article for luxury bathtubs, and it blended into the article really well. Made me think, “wow, this company really spoils their devs during crunch time.”

I guess most people don't think these office spaces are that cool? just let yourself be impressed for once lmao

Looks cool. Nice that Japan is actually safe enough to do this.

That looks incredible. Hopefully the closer proximity to Nintendo can only mean good things!

Always fun to see complaints over Pokemon's perpetual downward spiral (even in articles unrelated to the actual games) while the most recent entry is the fastest-selling game in the series, with the strongest legs as well.

Great to see that Gamefreak has moved into a new office, though it's sad that the employees likely won't be able to use it as they are most likely working from home.

It looks nice, but a bit generic. Personally the only change I would make is stuff a crap ton of pokemon plushies and memorabilia around it.

@Kirgo It’s not unreasonable to want the games to be at least 50% better to go along with the 50% increase in price. Sky high expectations were inevitable with Pokémon now being on the same console as BotW and Odyssey, that naturally invites comparisons to those games regardless of any kind of factors in past development practices. This is the big leagues, Game Freak needs to start acting like it. No excuses for all of the cheap and lazy corner cutting they’ve been doing.

Nice idea for the offices.

hopefully this means nintendo will oversee development a bit more so they stop producing lazy content

@Bolt_Strike
The price increase has to do with games being generally more expensive on Switch than 3DS, thats hardly the developers fault and they will also hardly make 50% more profit out of it.
On the other hand, if fans only wanted a 50% better game, that would have been one thing, but expectations were more like a 500% better game, that is what I find unreasonable.
In reality, we got a 10 - 20% better game, imo. and I can understand the criticism of that, I would want to see more in the future as well.

But the amount of hate these games get is, imo., still unreasonable.
Comparisons with botw still don't work either, I can trash pretty much any game series if I wanted, if I were to campare it to the jump botw made.
Animal Crossing for example, would look extremely bad if we measure it like that, yet that game doesn't get nearly as much hate as Pokemon did.
And don't let me even get started with the typical AAA games going from one console gen to the next...

But where are the Silph teleporter tiles, and is there a Rocket Hideout spiny tile maze on the basement?

It’s been said countless times already in here but I hope this means major improvements will happen soon. I really want the gen 4 remakes to be great. Those are the most memorable & my personal favorite Pokémon games

@westman98 ah, yes, the good ol' "it sold well, therefore it's good" fallacy.

If quality was the only determining attribute for sales, that'd mean that the Emoji Movie is good, the Fifty Shades books are good, and The Big Bang Theory is good.
If you know the first thing about writing as an art, you'll instantly recognize these as some of the worst examples in their respective art form in recent years.

And well, this is a more personal thing, but really, how can you Swoosh apologists still defend this game? For Pete's sake, is it really so hard to analyze a game outside of a vacuum?
Every argument I hear from your faction sounds like they've never played a non-Pokémon game.

This is good, they being together with Nintendo will probably lead to support from them.

@clvr
When did I say the game was "good"?

And even if I did, so what? I'm entitled to my opinion, as are you.

@Yorumi
Maybe it's just me but people seemed to go crazy about Pokemon, with AC they were just "upset".

@westman98 well, that's easily understood by your phrasing, since you start off addressing the complaints in the comments, which are about the quality of the games and not the sales, and then proceed to point to the huge numbers the games are making despite that.

@SwitchplayerJohn I mean, Little Town Hero was a thing.

@Bolt_Strike Like, Odyssey is the best game of all times on my opinion.
BOTW is awesome but I think is not that high as my favorites.
But GOD, we are on the console that can deliver them with no framedrop

I'm happy they got a new office. If they are close to Nintendo, I hope that means that they can have support from them easily during development. Anything that helps them deliver the best they can.

To me it just looks like a pretty standard office. I work in schools and some of the senior campus chill out and study areas look better than those pics.

@Kirgo The price is more expensive on the Switch than the 3DS because the Switch is much stronger hardware that is capable of much higher quality games. And yes, full scale retail games being $60 is out of their control, but what is within their control is whether or not to actual match that price (which nothing says they have to, if they want to make a cheaper game they can charge a cheaper price) and what they can do with that stronger hardware to make a game worth the money.

I said 50% for simplicity, but in reality the 3DS games were below what people expected for a $40 3DS game in the first place, those games were about 60-80% less than what they expected out of a 3DS game that was $5 more expensive than the DS. So really it's more like they expect something 200-300% better than the 3DS games not just to match the expectations of the jump to console, but also to make up the difference of what was lost in the 3DS era.

No one's saying the game should be 100% like BotW, but it should be relatively close in terms of scale and content. Not lightyears behind. There are dozens of AAA games that are large and open ended and full of content, Pokemon should be one of them.

Wow, those rooms are beautiful.

@Bolt_Strike
All you are doing right now with that comment is confirm my believe, that expectations are way too high...
The 3DS games were 60 - 80% less then expected? How can you seriously even write that?

Games vary massively in terms of scale and content, regardless of the price. If you think that is what should make the price and that games should at least come relatively close to botw for that money, then there are tons over tons of games that are all overpriced garbage.
If thats what you are thinking, fine I guess. Those are some really high standards though.

Btw. being "large and open ended" is not even always a good thing, that very much depends on the game. I would also like to know some examples of that "dozens of games" that deliver in your opinion. I hope there isn't too much Ubisoft in that list, because those games are critized all the time for having way too much boring content for the sake of being "large". For good reason.

@Kirgo The DS games all had very high levels of content, and larger and much more intricately designed maps. I mean, look at a region like Sinnoh, it's much larger with twice as many routes as the more recent games, tons of optional areas, and tons of dungeons. And the individual areas are all much more detailed and mazelike compared to the relatively simplistic and linear design of the 3DS games. Then there's the extra content. You had things like Contests, Secret Bases, the Battle Frontier, etc. and the 3DS games had none of those things except ORAS, which was a remake and even then lacked most of the extra content from Emerald and didn't have much more own its own merit. Also, I misspoke, it's not 60-80% less, it's 60-80% overall, 20-40% less. Sorry for the confusion there. But yes, the 3DS games were definitely less than the DS games and that's why the expectations were raised, because the standards were already too low for the 3DS games.

It doesn't have to be super close to BotW in terms of size and scale, even an overworld about half its size would still be acceptable, but it does have to be in the same league as a game like that. Also, I never really felt Ubisoft's games were all that boring in terms of extra content, but even if they are, that would still be a massive improvement over Pokemon. Boring content is still better than no content because anything that's "boring" will at least please someone as opposed to pleasing no one. But Pokemon doesn't really need to copy Ubisoft to be satisfying anyway, all they need to do is make the maps large enough and bring back the kinds of sidequests they dropped from the DS games.

I just hope this means Nintendo will support and manage GameFreak, especially with Pokémon, because they could definitely use it.
A Pokémon game with the design support of Monolith would be most epic.

So that's where the budget goes.

It's amazing how people here have no idea how development works and think that Nintendo wasn't already involved in Pokemon as publisher in production and many other aspects. GF going to the tokyo building (which isn't Nintendo HQ, that's on Kyoto) won't change anything. They are just on the same building, not on the same room.

@SwitchplayerJohn that depend on Pokémon Company part, Nintendo only publish the games,they don't have any saying on the development of the Pokémon franchise.

@Kirgo with Pokémon been the highest grossing media franchise in the world, Game Freak/Pokémon Company should have the resources to make Pokémon Sword e Shield or a future gen of the franchise, the Zelda Breath of the Wild of the franchise, i/we are tired of the Pokémon Company/Game Freak treating the Pokémon franchise like a indie franchise that very few people know, i/we expect a game with highest calibre of Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, not the dissapointment that is Pokémon Sword e Shield, since GEN 5 the franchise is sadly in a downward spiral of dissapointment and lack of quality.

Doesn't take much for a Pokemon comment section to go downhill. Who would have thought posting a bit of office furniture would set them all off.

I think the office space looks quite nice. My favourite is the one with the kitchen area but that's because I like food 😁

I do wonder how much direct oversight Nintendo has over Pokemon. I'm there's plenty of it already, but having an office so close to the Big N's headquarters will make it easier to do it in person. People underestimate the value of being able to directly interact with people. I hope this consolidation (this has happened with other parts of Nintendo) makes things easier for game development.

@yuwarite Yeap you are correct Game Freak never were own by Nintendo and Pulseman for the Mega Drive is a game they made exclusively for Sega and Sega themselves own that IP but Sega stupidly never acknowledge the game or re-release it in any capacity, not even for Sega's own mini console and collections cause Sega were too focus on Sonic. Heck Sega even made their own game (Vectorman) to buried Pulseman just like they made Virtua Fighter to buried Eternal Champions and that's sad cause Sega could had done more with them IPs. Now if only Game Freak doesn't bring their Sega mentality to their other games as a lot of the games they made don't have sequels despite being original and good such as Tembo the Badass Elephant, Mendal Palace, Drill Dozer, Giga Wrecker Alt, HarmoKnight, and Pulseman.

@Lionyone I can assure you it's real plants. Why the heck will there have that much fake plants. This is a modern Japanese office, of course the plants are real and are meant to filter the air. SMH

@Gmiol I'm not so sure. Parts of many Japanese cities look very sterile, ugly and utilitarian which is probably a legacy of post WW2 rapid rebuilding of razed cities as in Europe. That creates a somewhat architecturallly brutalised culture in some areas. Japan isn't all temples with stunning verdant natural gardens unfortunately.

@Lionyone you have no idea what you're talking about. World War 2 ended over 70 years ago. Have you been to any Japanese offices before? If you have, you'll know all the plants they place in their offices are real. There is no way those plants are fake. That makes no sense.

@Gmiol You wrote your comment like a little child. It is embarrassing to lack emotional self-control. Calm down. You misread and misunderstood my comment. I didn't refer to WW2 itself at all. I referred to the massive rebuilding after WW2. That rebuilding created a lot of ugly concrete utilitarian districts and very many of those buildings still stand today. The same is true in UK. The same is true across much of mainland Europe. For example Exeter in UK was a beautiful and unique city before WW2 but it was rebuilt in hideous fashion that still unfortunately exists. Plastic plants go perfectly with that concrete building ethos that human comfort and liveability don't matter, people are just production machines.

@Lionyone once again, I will ask. Have you been to a modern Japanese office? I did a one year post grad program in Tokyo, and every single office I visited and one which I interned at had real natural plants. There is no way Nintendo has fake plants in their offices. That makes no sense and doesn't go with the corporate culture in Japan. Anyone who has actually been to Japan knows you're full of ***** so stop with your WWII nonsense & baseless assumptions.

@Gmiol You're full of insults. It's not healthy for you to be so full of toxic emotions that poison yourself. Calm down.

@Lionyone Says the hater hating on an office & making baseless assumptions. Funny.