Thirty years. Ten generations. The biggest entertainment franchise on Earth. And in 2027, for the first time ever, a mainline Pokémon game will look at Brazil and say: this one is in your language.
By Ruan Martini, Daily Checkpoint, November 1, 2026
Let me set the scene properly, because February 27, 2026 was a bigger day than most people outside Brazil understood. It was Pokémon Day, the franchise’s 30th anniversary, and The Pokémon Company closed its Pokémon Presents with the announcement everybody expected and nobody was ready for: Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves, Generation 10, coming to Nintendo Switch 2 in 2027. New region. New starters. New open world. The internet did its usual thing and caught fire for a week.
And then Brazilian fans read the fine print, and a completely different fire started. Because buried in the announcement, in one calm sentence on the official site, was the line that three decades of Brazilian players had been waiting to hear: beginning with Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves, Brazilian Portuguese will officially be supported as a language players can choose. First time. Ever. In a mainline game.
I am not going to pretend to be neutral about this. I am Brazilian. I grew up in Recife playing these games in English, like every Brazilian kid I knew, because there was no other option. So yes, this article has the confirmed facts, the starters, the Switch 2 jump and the open world, all the normal stuff, and we will get to every bit of it. But we are starting with the Portuguese, because for millions of players in my country, the Portuguese IS the headline. Everything else is the second paragraph.
What Is Actually Confirmed (And What Is Not)
Before the feelings, the receipts, because this site runs on receipts. Here is everything that is officially confirmed about Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves, straight from The Pokémon Company and Game Freak, with the speculation left at the door where it belongs.
The games were revealed at the Pokémon Presents of February 27, 2026, the 30th anniversary show. They are Generation 10 of the mainline series, developed by Game Freak, and they launch worldwide, simultaneously, at some point in 2027. No exact date yet. No price yet. No preorders yet. Anyone who gives you a month right now is guessing, and I will tell you when that changes.
The platform is the story almost as much as the games: Winds and Waves are Nintendo Switch 2 exclusives. They skip the original Switch entirely. After ten years of mainline Pokémon being built for hardware that was already wheezing at launch, Gen 10 is the first generation designed from day one for the stronger machine, and that one fact is going to carry a lot of this article, because it should carry a lot of your expectations.
The setting, in The Pokémon Company’s own words, is an open world of beautiful windswept islands and a vast ocean with glittering waves. The Pokémon of this region live in harmony with a lush environment and have developed their own ecosystems, and your adventure will have you teaming up with them against the difficult road ahead and, at times, against the forces of nature themselves. The reveal trailer also teased underwater exploration, and I am using the word teased on purpose: it was shown, not detailed. Nobody official has explained how deep that system goes, pun fully intended, and until they do, it stays in the tease column.
Your character wears a different outfit depending on which version you buy, Winds or Waves, which is a cute throwback to when version differences were more than a handful of exclusive monsters. And the trailer introduced a pair of special Pikachu in island outfits, called Mr. Windychu and Ms. Wavychu, whose role in the story is still a mystery. I have no analysis for the Windychus. Nobody does. They simply live in my head now, rent free, in their little holiday shirts.
The Starters: A Bean, A Puppy, And A Gecko Walk Into A Region
Every generation gets judged first by its starters, so meet the class of Gen 10.
Browt is the Grass type, the Bean Chick Pokémon, described by The Pokémon Company as lively but clumsy. A small round bird with a bean sprout growing out of its head, tripping over its own feet into our hearts. Browt has the classic Overgrow ability, and if history is any teacher, its final evolution will either be majestic or a complete fever dream, with no middle ground. Grass starters accept this risk. It is in the contract.
Pombon is the Fire type, the Puppy Pokémon, guileless and friendly, and folks, it is a Pomeranian with a flame on its head. I need you to understand the tactical situation here. Game Freak looked at thirty years of starter design and concluded, correctly, that a fluffy fire puppy is an unstoppable weapon. Pombon has Blaze, the traditional Fire starter ability, and roughly eleven million people have already chosen it. I am one of them. My heart made the decision before my brain finished reading the press release, and my brain has since reviewed the footage and agreed.
Gecqua is the Water type, the Water Gecko Pokémon, the intelligent one of the trio, with Torrent as its ability. A sleek little gecko built for a region of islands and ocean, which might make Gecqua the most at home starter in the whole lineup. If the underwater teasing turns into real exploration, the Water starter stocks are going to the moon.
Their evolutions have not been revealed. Their final typings are unknown. The box legendaries have not been shown, the region does not officially have a public name as I write this, and the battle gimmick of Gen 10, because there is always a battle gimmick, is still locked in a drawer at Game Freak. That is the honest state of play: a real announcement, a real trailer, three real starters, and a very deliberate wall of silence behind them.
Now The Part Where Brazil Cries A Little
Okay. Back to the Portuguese, because I promised myself I would explain why this matters to people who did not grow up needing it explained.
Pokémon arrived in Brazil the way it arrived everywhere in the late nineties: like a weather event. The anime was on TV, the cards were in every schoolyard, the games were the center of the universe. And the games were in English. All of them. Red and Blue, in English. Gold and Silver, in English. Every generation after that, in English, or, if you were lucky and desperate, in Spanish, which is close enough to Portuguese that a determined Brazilian kid could squint at it and get the general idea. Squinting at a cousin language is not the same as reading your own, but for about thirty years, squinting was the official Brazilian Pokémon experience.
Think about what that actually means for a kid. Pokémon is a text heavy RPG. The story is text. The move descriptions are text. The jokes, the item names, the Pokédex entries, the weird little things NPCs say in every town: all text. Brazilian kids learned English from Pokémon the way you learn to swim by being thrown in a lake. Many of us got good at it. Some of us built entire personalities on it. But plenty of kids bounced off, or played a shallower version of the game than the one Japanese and American kids got, memorizing which menu option meant yes and treating the story as decoration.
And the wait had a special comedy to it, because Brazil is not some tiny market you can forget on a map. Brazil is one of the biggest gaming markets on the planet, with a giant, loud, deeply online Pokémon fandom that shows up for everything. The franchise prints money here. The anime raised generations here. And still, generation after generation, the language list came out with Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish twice, Korean, Chinese twice, and no Portuguese, in a game made by a company that absolutely knew we were out here. Latin American Spanish got in. We got to watch our neighbors read the game in almost our language for years, which is a very specific kind of torture that only a Brazilian can fully taste.
So when The Pokémon Company finally put Brazilian Portuguese on the official list, eleven supported languages for Winds and Waves, the reaction in Brazil was not “oh, nice feature.” It was people in their thirties posting that they were going to cry. Grown adults. Over a language option. Because it is not a language option, really. It is the franchise finally turning to one of its biggest audiences and saying: you were never an afterthought market to us. It only took thirty years, ten generations, and the series becoming the highest grossing media franchise in human history. No rush, apparently. We were not going anywhere. We literally could not leave. There was nowhere else to go. It is Pokémon.
To be fair, the wind has been shifting. Nintendo has been adding Brazilian Portuguese to more of its big recent releases, and the Switch 2 era has clearly made the language a standard checkbox instead of a special request. Winds and Waves is where that shift reaches the biggest series of them all. The first Brazilian kids who play a mainline Pokémon in Portuguese will not know any of this history. They will just pick up the game, read everything, and understand every joke the way kids in Tokyo and New York always could. That is the whole point. The best version of this victory is the one where the next generation never notices it happened.
The Switch 2 Jump: Why This Generation Has No Excuses Left
Now let us talk about the hardware, because it decides whether Gen 10 is a celebration or an apology tour.
Generation 9, Scarlet and Violet, was a genuinely good Pokémon game trapped inside a technical mess. The open world ambition was real, the design ideas were strong, and the performance on the original Switch became the story anyway: the frame rate struggles, the pop in, the bugs that turned into memes within a weekend of launch. Fans forgave a lot of it because the game underneath was fun, but nobody forgot, and Game Freak knows nobody forgot. It became the defining argument about the series: the ideas have outgrown the machines and the schedules they are built on.
Winds and Waves removes the easiest excuse. Switch 2 only. Stronger hardware, modern storage, a bigger screen in your hands and a proper picture on your TV. The reveal trailer’s whole personality is space: wide islands, a huge sparkling ocean, weather moving over the water. That is a game that wants to breathe. For the first time in the series’ history, a mainline generation is launching on hardware that is new at the same time as the game, instead of hardware in its retirement years.
Here is what I will be watching when the next trailers land, and what you should watch too. First, performance in the open world, in motion, not in carefully chosen trailer shots. Second, whether the ocean is real space you travel and explore, or pretty scenery between islands, because the underwater teasing only matters if the water is a place and not a loading screen. Third, how the ecosystems they bragged about actually behave: Pokémon living in the world with habits and territories is the dream this series has been selling since it went 3D, and Gen 10 is the first one with the hardware headroom to really attempt it. And fourth, the schedule. 2027 gives Game Freak the longest runway a generation has had in a while, and after Gen 9, the most valuable thing this game can ship with is time.
My honest position: I am optimistic, and I am keeping the receipt of that optimism right here in public, dated, so future me cannot pretend he knew all along. The ingredients are the best they have ever been. Now they have to cook.
What To Watch From Here
The waiting game has a known rhythm. Pokémon news moves on Pokémon Day, which means the smart money watches the Pokémon Presents expected around February 2027 for the next real drop: starter evolutions, legendaries, the region’s name, and, if we are lucky, a release date. Between now and then, expect artwork drops, starter merchandise, and a slow drip of new Pokémon reveals. I keep the whole 2027 calendar, confirmed and rumored, separated and labeled over on our Coming Soon page, because the internet will spend the next year trying to sell you guesses as facts, and labels matter.
And if you want to prepare your heart properly, may I suggest the training arc: go back to Kanto. The 2004 remake that defined Pokémon for my generation, Pokémon FireRed, got a Switch release this year, and I wrote about why it is the perfect warm up for Gen 10. Twenty dollars, zero hurry, all comfort. Play it in English one last time, for the old days. Then put it down, and get ready to read a Pokémon game in Portuguese in 2027, like it was always supposed to be.
So tell me, because this is the real first decision of Generation 10 and I will be reading every answer: are you team Browt, team Pombon, or team Gecqua? And if you are Brazilian, be honest with me. Did you also get a little emotional over a language menu? It is okay. This is a safe space. We waited thirty years. We earned the feelings and the puppy.
Sources
The Pokémon Company, official Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves announcement and game pages on Pokemon.com, including the starter profiles, the Switch 2 exclusivity, the 2027 worldwide simultaneous release and the Brazilian Portuguese language announcement, February 27, 2026. The Pokémon Company North America press release, “Pokémon Continues 30th Anniversary Celebrations with the Unveiling of Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves,” February 27, 2026. Polygon and GameSpot, coverage of the Pokémon Presents reveal, February 27, 2026. Nintendo Life, official artwork gallery, February 27, 2026.