Pokémon Home's Reveal Explains the Absence of a Much-Loved Feature

For all Pokémon Sword and Shield has added to the series, many fans have fixated on what the game lacks. One major missing feature is the Global Trade Station. Introduced in Generation IV as a way to take advantage of the Nintendo DS's Wi-Fi functionality and encourage international trading, the GTS has been a useful tool for trainers hoping to complete their Pokédex, and its absence from Sword and Shield was deeply felt.

Now, the GTS is coming back as part of Pokémon Home, the upcoming app for the Nintendo Switch and smartphones. Like Pokémon Bank before it, Home is primarily a cloud storage system for Pokémon that also allows users to transfer Pokémon from older games, though it will have more features than Bank. The GTS's return in this form actually helps clarify why it was removed from the base game in the first place.

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Pokémon Home will allow players to trade on the smartphone app. Notably, this feature is missing from the Switch version of the app, which is limited to transferring Pokémon from older games into Home and moving Pokémon between Home and Sword and Shield.

Unlike the random Wonder Trades found in Sword and Shield, the GTS allows players to specify their wants, making it easier to find specific Pokémon a trainer may to need to complete the Dex, such as version exclusives. This hasn't always worked perfectly. It's impossible to guarantee that the Graveler you requested won't be holding an Everstone that prevents it from evolving into Golem. Others use it as a way to show off their Pokémon, flooding the GTS with impossible to fulfill requests. Still, the feature was incredibly useful, and fans were sad to lose it.

The reveal of Home's specifics, like most Pokémon news nowadays, was met with a mix of interest and anger from fans. Home will have a free tier, but its features are quite limited next to the $15.99 a year Premium subscription. The new app certainly has way more features that certainly warrant some price increase to account for server costs, but the price jump from Bank is understandably jarring for those used to paying $4.99 a year.

Then there are those angry that these features, especially the GTS, were not available in the base game. However, making the GTS part of Bank makes perfect sense. Since Sword and Shield lack a National Dex, many Pokémon would have been excluded from the GTS if the feature was part of the game. Having it accessible on both would be ideal, but this likely would have been hard to implement and led to technical issues should a player try and trade or receive and Pokémon not found in Sword and Shield. By making the GTS part of Home, Game Freak is making it possible to trade any Pokémon, regardless of whether it can be used in Sword and Shield.

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