In a complete surprise announcement during today’s Pokémon Presentation, Pokémon Company CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara revealed that Pokémon Snap is returning after 21 years! New Pokémon Snap (weak name) as it is known, has players take on the role of a Pokémon photographer. Traveling to various locations across a series of islands, it is your job to snap pictures of every creature you can see!

Though the trailer is brief, it shows off just how much spirit from the original game is returning. Levels are played out on rails to let you focus on just taking photos. At one part of the trailer, you can clearly see you are even riding in what appears to be the Zero-One from the original game! A number of scenes also seem to feature throwable apples though we never see the player throwing them. It makes me curious as to what power-ups we can expect to see in the final game!

The sheer amount and variety of Pokémon to see has dramatically increased since Gen 1 and the sampling shown off in the trailer is exciting to me personally. The interactions between the different Pokémon species are also very interesting to see. At one point we see a Pidgeot snatch up a Magikarp, presumably to consume what little of its scaly hide is edible. There is another scene where a Torterra and Dodrio are staring each other down. It brings more life into the franchise that just hasn’t really been explored to date outside of a few disturbing Pokédex entries.

New Pokémon Snap is still under active development and is a collaboration between The Pokémon Company and Bandai Namco for Nintendo Switch. I can’t tell you how happy my wife and I are that this game is coming out as we still regularly revisit the N64 original. We even had a discussion about the possibility of it happening not 2 weeks ago! I can’t wait to see more as it gets announced and share it with you all.

What do you think about the return of Pokémon Snap?