Detective Pikachu Returns dev explains long wait for the game

To say that we’ve been waiting a long time for Detective Pikachu Returns would be an understatement. After it was first teased in 2019, it was finally revealed this year.

Director Yasunori Yanagisawa spoke about the wait in an interview with IGN. Yanagisawa explained that the project took roughly five years overall, and moving from Switch to 3DS allowed for many more possibilities. 

Yanagisawa explained:

As you mentioned, there was quite a bit of a wait. The overall development and production was about five years for this game.

One of the main reasons behind this is mostly the change in hardware, and that with the more specs available hardware-wise there are just a lot more things that were possible to do. It was hard to narrow down and figure out exactly what sort of things the developers wanted to do with this game.

Yanagisawa would go on to talk about some of the things the development team were able to do this time around. More Pokemon could be shown at once and Ryme City should be more lively compared to what we saw in the original 3DS game.

According to Yanagisawa:

“One of the obvious main differences between the hardware is that the 3DS was two screens, and now with the Switch we have one screen. There was kind of this overhaul in the UI and the interface. The appearance of that has really changed a lot.

As for hardware specs, since it is… There’s more things we can do with it. We can show a lot more Pokémon appearing on the screen at the same time. We’re hoping that is making the world of Ryme City a lot more lively and also really expanding on the world where humans and Pokémon co-exist.”