Update (3:30 PM) – The HTML metadata on the European Nintendo Direct website is using “3DS” as one of the page’s keywords (in case it wasn’t painfully obvious to everyone that Pokemon is in fact announcing a 3DS game tomorrow).

The January 8th announcement page on the official Japanese website just updated, stating that tomorrow, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata will hold a 10-minute “Pokemon Direct” video conference to announce the big Pokemon news. According to Nintendo, this will take place at 8:00 PM Japan time, or 11:00 AM GMT / 6:00 AM EST / 3:00 AM PDT. We will of course update you as the news is rolling out, so be sure to check back!

As of this news story’s initial posting, the countdown timer on the Japanese Pokemon website is programmed incorrectly and only shows an accurate countdown time for fans in Japan (I had to delay posting this story because their timer was conflicting with the conference time and I couldn’t figure out what was going on). So instead, you can view what time the video will air in your region by clicking here.

So a big Pokemon announcement coming through Nintendo Direct a.k.a. “Pokemon Direct?” I doubt this is anything other than a new generation announcement. Gamefreak has had the 3DS development kit since long before Black and White‘s release and would likely have figured out how to use the 3D to Pokemon’s full benefit now. It was obviously too late for them to implement the 3D in B/W since they would not have been able to think it out fully, and any sequel or remake wouldn’t rob a future generation of such a groundbreaking feature by debuting in 3D (as we saw with BW2). So now it seems natural to introduce the next generation of Pokemon on the 3DS. I imagine that because of the 3D, Gamefreak probably had to re-imagine how to present the Pokemon world on the available hardware, and of course because it’s Gamefreak, they probably did a spectacular job. Nintendo itself doesn’t usually get involved in Pokemon announcements, so the fact they are this time seems to indicate that they probably want to show off a groundbreaking Pokemon game. I wonder just how much the 3D will change the way the Pokemon world is presented (assuming all of this predicting is correct).

For those of you who did not see my editorial in November, I predicted we would get Generation VI hints in December because of how the Genesect movie would be advertised. Assuming that we are in fact learning about Generation VI tomorrow, it turns out I was off by a few weeks for when Pokemon would actually start hinting about the next generation because of the unexpected shiny Genesect news they used for the movie’s December advertising. Anyway, my editorial went into why we would probably see a Generation VI soon, why the next Pokemon games would not be Ruby and Sapphire remakes, and several other interesting predictions based on past Pokemon trends. You should read it if you didn’t back in November!

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