"It's less about having hard lines between the game and the animation series, and more about us working together to decide what Pokémon would actually be like," he added. But that wasn't to say that the anime had started dictating elements of the games.
"The animated series is played in around 75 countries and it creates certain expectations when people see these Pokémon in-game," Gamefreak's Junichi Masuda told Eurogamer.
The games' menagerie of Pokémon have received a visual upgrade too, with fully-animated 3D models in battle directly influenced by their anime counterparts. Nintendo has been keen to show off some of the more dynamic camera moments in X and Y, but this is the standard top-down view. It highlights some of the new detail found in the world and keeps the action focused on a more specific area, counteracting the feeling that some earlier environments seemed too empty. The games retain a top-down perspective for the majority of overworld action, albeit with a slightly zoomed-in camera. X and Y boast a fresh, fully 3D look that's a blend of Pokémon's classic top-down view with a few cues taken from its long-running TV spin-off. The handheld Pokémon series has been edging towards a 3D world for some time, with increasingly dynamic environments in the past few entries. True, there are a few gameplay and story tweaks ( the introduction of Mega Evolution being the most notable example), but by far the biggest change is the game's vastly upgraded visual style. Two dozen core games later and with Nintendo's palette of colours finally exhausted, this latest dual release presents a familiar scenario.
It's fair to say that the now-familiar Pokémon formula is left largely unchanged in X and Y. There are baddies to defeat, eight gyms to beat and lots of low-level bug Pokémon in the game's first forest area. After a brief farewell to your hometown you step out into the long grass, empty Pokédex in hand and an untested new Pokémon strapped to your belt.