Pokemon Just Showed Up In A Strange New Place

We have Pokemon games on mobile. We got our first mainline Pokemon title on a home console. Now Pokemon is playable on a completely different platform; one that definitely took us by surprise.

According to VentureBeat, two brand new Pokemon games have launched on Facebook: Pokemon Tower Battle and Pokemon Medallion Battle. The premise of Tower Battle seems fairly straightforward; players work to obtain Pokemon they can then stack on top of one another, competing to see who can create the largest tower. Medallion Battle, however, seems like the deeper title of the two. That game appears to mix a card game with the traditional journey taken in most mainline Pokemon adventures.

At press time, Pokemon Tower Battle is available worldwide. Pokemon Medallion Battle, however, is only available in the Asia-Pacific region of the globe. We're hoping the latter sees the light of day in the West sometime soon.

If you look at these releases along with Pokemon Quest, and also recall that Detective Pikachu rocked theaters in 2019, you might get the sense that Pokemon is making a big push this year. The franchise has long been a cross-media asset, with not just video games, but movies, cartoons, collectibles, merch, and more. But we've never seen The Pokemon Company take so many risks on the gaming side of things. Things seem to have worked out thus far; none of the releases have been bad. So there's something hopeful to be drawn from this: maybe we'll eventually get that Pokemon MMO, after all.

We'll keep an eye out for any other Pokemon games that could be in the pipeline. We didn't have a heads up about Tower Battle and Medallion Battle, so who knows; maybe The Pokemon Company has a few other experiences waiting in the wings. Like that MMO. Could we have that MMO, please?