Detective Pikachu... Returns!
By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.
Detective Pikachu is getting a sequel. In October, you’ll be able to once again solve mysteries with Tim Goodman and his coffee-loving Pikachu with a voice that sounds suspiciously like Will Arnett.
The first Detective Pikachu game launched on the DS in 2018. In it, Tim Goodman and a strangely verbose Pikachu in a funny hat worked together to solve various mysteries around Ryme City while investigating the disappearance of Tim’s missing father. Despite it being a Pokémon game, Detective Pikachu had some oddly dark themes with a plot that’s basically a Nintendo-ified version of a James Bond movie. (I’m not kidding — there’s a conspiracy by a media exec to engineer pokémon-related disasters so he can report on them and increase the power of his news company. That’s basically Tomorrow Never Dies.)
In 2019, Detective Pikachu got a live-action movie starring Justice Smith, with Ryan Reynolds as the voice of Pikachu. Despite the absurdity of the premise of a live-action Pokémon movie, Detective Pikachu was pretty damn good, becoming patient zero for all the “video game adaptations are good now” takes long before HBO’s The Last Of Us exhausted the format.
From Nintendo’s press release, it seems like the Detective Pikachu sequel will tackle the mystery of Pikachu’s identity. In the first game, Pikachu — an associate of Tim’s father, Harry — revealed that he has no memory of who he is nor why Tim is the only one who can understand him.
So while it doesn’t seem like Detective Pikachu Returns will be another adaptation of an Ian Fleming short story, I’d still love to see the game
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