Pokémon Presents Reveals Pokémon Champions 2026 Arrival, New Legends Z-A Story Trailer, A New Puzzle Game That’s Out Now, and More

The Pokémon Company hosted a Pokémon Presents event today, which had a slew of announcements, including a new mobile game called Pokémon Friends that’s out on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 and mobile devices, a 2026 release window for Pokémon Champions, and a new story trailer for the highly-anticipated Pokémon Legends Z-A.

Starting with the brand-new game that was announced, Pokémon Friends is a new puzzle game that can be played on iOS and Android mobile devices, or on your Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 system. It’s a puzzle game that includes 2D and 3D puzzles, all in the service of creating your own plush room that you can stuff to the brim with Pokémon paraphernalia.

“Solve puzzles and get your daily ‘aha’ moment,” the trailer proclaims, as Pokémon Friends is seemingly the latest in The Pokémon Company’s line of mobile games it wants people checking in on daily, like Pokémon TCG and Pokémon Sleep. And speaking of those mobile games, there were also announcements for the above two, along with Pokémon GO, Pokémon Unite, Pokémon Masters EX, and Pokémon Café ReMix.

There were also two announcements on the adaptation front, with new episodes announced for the Netflix series, Pokémon Concierge, and the reveal of a brand new stop-motion animated show, Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu.

It’s being developed in collaboration with Aardman, a stop-motion animation studio that has worked on films, television series, and video games for the last 40 years. You’ve seen their work if you’ve ever seen films, shows and games from series like Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, and Shaun the Sheep. The only downside is that it won’t arrive until sometime in 2027, so we still have some time to wait for its launch.

Pokémon Champions being shown off was one of the other highlights in the presentation, which is also releasing on Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, and mobile devices. A gameplay overview dug into various elements of the game, including how battles, training, and recruiting Pokémon work. It’s another title that doesn’t have a 2025 arrival point, as it’ll launch sometime in 2026.

Pokémon Legends Z-A getting a story trailer was what The Pokémon Company closed the event on, showing off more gameplay of it running on Nintendo Switch 2, and of course digging into the plot’s narrative, and what appears to be the main conflict of the plot, that Pokémon are mega-evolving on their own, causing danger and chaos across Lumiose City. Which also reveals new mega-evolutions, like Mega-Dragonite.

There was also the reveal of a Nintendo Switch 2 bundle including Pokémon Legends Z-A, which will be available when the game launches on October 16, 2025.

Lastly, the other key highlight from the show was more information about the Pokémon Kanto theme park, which is due to be open “soon,” which is being built in Tokyo, Japan, in an amusement park called Yomuriland. Over 600 Pokémon will be featured in the park, according to The Pokémon Company chief creative fellow, Junichi Masuda.

As one of the longest Pokémon Presents events in the history of this showcase, it delivered on having enough announcements to fill up the 24-minute runtime.

This year’s previous Pokémon Presents event was a dedicated look at Pokémon Legends Z-A, which also announced the October release date, and promised that the Switch 2 version of the game will feature “improved graphics and frame rates,” which sounds great, but hopefully it doesn’t mean that the Nintendo Switch version of the game will be anything like previous Pokémon games in terms of performance.