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Manga Guide: The Path to Being a Plakoro Master!
August 23rd, 2026

Dogasu @ 10:37 JST -- The September 2026 issue of CoroCoro Comics featured a surprise new one-shot manga, The Path to Being a Plakoro Master!, and so the Manga Guide's been updated accordingly.


The new comic is essentially an eight-page tutorial on how to play "Plakoro," a dice-based Pokémon battle game that went on sale last month in Japan. A Story Synopsis, Character Bios, and Author Bio have all been added to the comic's page on the site.

This comic appears to be a one-shot and so I'm not expecting to have to make any more updates, but if additional chapters are ever made I'll be sure to add them to the site.


Celebrating 30 Years of Pokémon, The Pokémon Short Movie Festival ~ Pocket Monsters The Movie Short Movie Masterpiece Selection 2 ~
August 17th, 2026

Dogasu @ 07:14 JST -- Back in May the Jimbocho Theater in Tokyo -- which just happens to be owned by Pocket Monsters publisher Shogakukan -- held a film festival in which they brought three of the Pikachu shorts back to the big screen. Apparently that festival was a success because they're doing it again in an event they're calling Celebrating 30 Years of Pokémon, The Pokémon Short Movie Festival ~ Pocket Monsters The Movie Short Movie Masterpiece Selection 2 ~.


The three shorts being shown this time around are:

• "Pikachu's Exploration Party" (originally shown alongside "Revelation Lugia")
• "Pikachu's Exciting Hide-and-Seek" (originally shown alongside "Celebi A Timeless Encounter")
• "The Dancing Pokémon Secret Base" (originally shown alongside "The Seven Nights' Star of Wishing, Jirachi")

More details about the festival, including showtimes, promotional material, and other notes can be found in its own section in the Movies & Specials Guide here.

Pre-order tickets go on sale starting Friday, September 4th.


Manga Guide:  Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters, Pocket Monsters Special
August 8th, 2026

Dogasu @ 21:22 JST -- A new pair of chapters of Pocket Monsters comics are out, so I've made the usual update to the Manga Guide.


Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters, Chapter 61: A group of Metamon decide to prank Pippi and Pikachu by transforming into Red while he's off shopping!

Pocket Monsters Special Scarlet & Violet, Chapter 35: Scarlet faces off against Biwa to take down the Star-Dan's Team Caph base! Can she defeat the Star-Dan leader? Plus, Nelke confronts Botan!


In other Pocket Monsters Special news, artist Satoshi Yamamoto recently posted on Twitter that after he finishes work on this chapter (Chapter 35) and the fifth collected volume (which comes out August 28th), he and the rest of the team are scheduled to have a meeting where they'll work to figure out the release date for the next regular volume of the series. Volume 64 was released way back in February 2023 and so any news on Volume 65, no matter how minor, is certainly welcome!


New Feature: Japanese Streaming Guide
August 2nd, 2026

Dogasu @ 21:12 JST -- I have a list of pages I want to get up on the website before I start diving back into doing Episode Comparisons again (which has now gone from starting "sometime around July" to "TBD" because of how long it's taking me to finish my Johto (re)watch), and one of those pages is a guide dedicated to the streaming services that are showing the Pocket Monsters animated series. And so today, I'm happy to introduce the newest addition to the Features section, the Japanese Streaming Guide.


This guide takes a look at each of the streaming services that offer Pokémon content and breaks down what episodes, movies, specials, and other videos they have up. Some of them have all the TV series,  some of them only have the current series, some have the movies, some have content exclusive to that particular streaming service...there's a lot of variation out there! So this guide tries to help make sense of all that.

Pocket Monsters related physical media isn't really much of a thing anymore in Japan (the last Blu-ray was released back in 2024) so streaming is, like it or not, the best way to legally view the Japanese version of the series in the year 2026.

Due to the nature of streaming services this page will likely need to be updated constantly. I won't post about it here each and every time I make an update to the page, but I'll try to check in at least once a month to make sure it's as up-to-date as it can be.