The End of Pokémon Bank
Posted August 16, 2026Cue Majora’s Mask sound effect.
The doom approaches. As was predictable, the shutdown of Pokémon Bank has been announced. Here are some sources.
It’s 2026 and I’m back to talk about Pokémon after a couple of years. I talked about the closure of Bank’s eventuality back when I talked about the closure of the 3DS eShop.
I am still very sad and angry about all of this. It was obvious back when Pokémon Bank launched in 2014 that this was its eventual end state, and that is why it was a mistake to use a cloud service for this. The cloud connectivity adds a lot, by all means keep it, but don’t make it a part of the essential functioning of Pokémon’s ongoing connectivity. This always should’ve been a local wireless transfer. Home makes the same mistake.
Pokémon has always been weird in how well it kept this connectivity going. You can, today, in 2026, start Pokémon Ruby on the original GameBoy Advance and take those Pokémon you met there all the way up through the intervening years to the present day. That remarkable dedication to the series’s principles that your Pokémon are your friends and you don’t leave them behind is one of the many things that makes it so special. When Bank closes, that chain will be forever broken. And I’m sad because it was all avoidable.
It’s not reasonable to rely on that aging hardware for the series’s longevity - the rereleases like Fire Red & Leaf Green on the Switch virtual console absolutely make sense (though should be cheaper), both so they’re readily available to modern players and to new ones who never had the chance to obtain the old systems.
But I’m not here to wallow in sadness about what should have been. I’m here to talk about Pokémon - because like last time, a deadline engenders motivation. And I have new Pokémon edge cases to talk about. Like this one about Pokéballs:
I am here for this kind of insanity
So where am I going to go this time? What new unique past Pokémon combations will I hunt down? I’m not actually sure yet. But I know where I’m starting: the 3DS virtual console Generation 1 (Red, Blue, & Yellow) and Generation 2 (Gold, Silver, & Crystal) games. I didn’t finish those during my last eleventh-hour-scramble, so this time I will. Virtual Console Crystal even has the Celebi event unlocked that I never got to play as a kid.
I was up to the Elite Four in Blue, which I have now completed. And that is what brought me back to this blog: to check my own previous post about the Best Master Ball Targets. I wanted to check to see if Mewtwo was the best choice and realized that I had left myself a little todo in that post! I hadn’t decided on the Generation 1 & 2 best candidates back then. So my first new piece of info is I updated that post with my choice for Red, Blue, & Yellow (it is Mewtwo).
I’m scouring the internet for bizarre Pokémon edge cases again, finding the secrets that I have access to with my plethora of Pokémon hardware. Other folks are also hard at work cataloguing this information too. Let’s see if I can help out, just a little bit.
I suspect I’m going to learn more about ribbons, like this somewhat difficult-to-obtain criterion for one