People here in Japan are very angry about this also. I am not speaking for everyone in Japan, but a lot of other Japanese people on the internet seem to be upset about Gamefreak removing Pokemon. It is not just westerners that are concerned. This is a huge deal for two reasons, the first reason is that in Japan we are rarely vocal about our opinions because we don't like to start conflict. If we are very passionate about something and tell people our opinion publicly, it must be very important. Pokemon is a very popular video game series in Japan and a lot of people care about it. We want Gamefreak and Nintendo to put as much effort into these games as they can to make it the best quality game it can be. They could have definitely added all of the Pokemon and had no real reason to cut them. The Switch can definitely handle 1000+ Pokemon models, it is much more powerful than the 3ds and that could handle 800+ Pokemon plus their walking/running animations. They already had every old Pokemon model from Sun and Moon to use and just had to update it graphic wise. Plus they already had the 151 Kanto models finished in Let's Go. They could have put Sword & Shield as a priority and had the best team working on the game but they didn't, instead they side lined Pokemon in favor of a new game and had their secondary team developing Pokemon. They didn't hire enough people to work on the game and treated it like it wasn't important. The second reason this is a problem, is that when they realized they weren't going to have enough time to update every Pokemon model and put it into the game, they chose not to hire more people and do it. Instead they came up with an unconvincing excuse all so that they wouldn't have to spend any extra time, money, or effort into developing the game. They figured they could get away with cutting content because they figured people would buy the game no matter what terrible decisions they make. They think saving money is more important than making a great game. I am not saying these games are bad. I am not blaming the developers, they did the best they could being understaffed and rushed for time. I think these could be great games with some really good new features. But I am disappointed with the direction Gamefreak has been going with the Pokemon games recently and this terrible policy. If you don't care about anything Gamefreak does and want to buy Pokemon games anyway that is fine. I am just saying my concerns and other people's for the future of Pokemon. I also hope people don't threaten to harm Masuda Junichi or any other higher member Gamefreak and the Pokemon company. Corporate greed is one of the biggest issues people have with this whole thing. It is a major problem with a lot of big companies. Gamefreak and Nintendo are planning on cutting a ton of Pokemon that people love from their future games because they don't want to bother hiring more people or spending more time and money to make the games fun for everyone. It's about more than just the fact that they are not including all of the Pokemon. Gamefreak and Nintendo have been prioritising other games over Pokemon for a while now and have not been putting nearly enough effort into recent games. They have been making games with unfinished areas like the train station in X and Y or no post game. They have started handing out legendary and mythical Pokemon as gifts instead of introducing them through in-game events that allow us to catch them in a unique area of the game and add to their lore. And sometimes they add extra things in a version two of the game but we shouldn't have to pay for a whole other game just so we can get a finished version. But it seems like for every step forward they take another two steps back. Some people are pretending not to notice these these things and are still looking through rose colored glasses (I hope I used that English phrase right). I understand that people want to see the best in all Pokemon games but in reality the games have some large flaws and arent perfect. The problem with that is that it allows Gamefreak to get way with almost anything, that is partially why there was a drop in quality. People criticize certain parts of a game because they want them to be fixed in the next game. The other reason for some parts of the games being unfinished is that they are very persistent with yearly releases. They don't listen to their fans for the most part and that has to change. Pokemon is an important franchise that deserves a super high quality game with a ton of time and effort like Breath of the Wild or Mario Odyssey. The semi-open world areas of Sword & Shield look beautiful and the Pokemon in the over-world is a great new feature. But at the same time they got rid if very popular and creative things like Mega Evolution in favor of one time gimmicks. And if you like those gimmicks that is fine, but it shows that they are not listening to what the majority of fans want. And now they are giving us an unfinished product that has even less than their 3ds games did. That is not acceptable and that is the biggest problem, Nintendo and Gamefreak as a company think it is okay to put less effort into Pokemon games because we will buy them any way. People want to let them know that we are tired of our favorite games being set to the side . We want them to prioritize Pokemon for once. Sword & Shield deserve to be the best quality Pokemon games they can be. ありがとうございます (Someone said I should put this on a website called Reddit, I am a guy in Japan, so I can't use English websites. Well I guess I could try to search it but I don't want to make an account on an English site I wouldnt use. Anyone reading this can put this on that site or any other discussion site and add their own points if they want.)