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The story
Game Freak has announced “Rain Then Shine Girl” (Ame Nochi Hare Onna), a new smartphone game that syncs with real-world weather data. Director Shigeru Ohmori said the idea grew out of a simple thought: if people are going to check the weather forecast every day just to do their laundry, why not go ahead and build a game around checking the forecast? On 5ch’s hardware/industry (Geha) board, some praised the concept itself as interesting, while others — pointing to the studio’s recent string of underwhelming titles — argued Game Freak should focus on properly making Pokémon games instead of churning out oddball projects. Opinions also split over whether the non-Pokémon output amounts to the dev team letting off steam, with some citing past titles like 2024’s “Pandora Land” as a reference point for whether this backlash is fair.
Game Freak announces new title “Rain Then Shine Girl” — a smartphone game that uses real-world weather data. Exclusive comments from director Shigeru Ohmori have arrived!
Source: famitsu.com / Original article here
What people said
Somebody's probably already done this somewhere, but I honestly think this is a genuinely good idea.
The whole point of checking the forecast is to do laundry, so what you actually have to do afterward isn't play a game — it's the laundry lol
Wasn't that the mobile game made by Fujisawa, the guy who worked on Dragon Quest? The story was well received, but the game balance was as bad as early Dragon Quest X (only one viable option, everything else was junk).
I think both this one and the last one are probably just letting off steam.
If they only ever worked on Pokémon, you'd get idiots on the team building up frustration thinking "I could make something way more impressive than this!"
You know the type — there are guys right here on Geha who insist Game Freak would be better off if it split from Nintendo.
It's simple — of course they'd want to make other things as a breather. These days there aren't many developers left with enough breathing room to do stuff like this instead of just grinding out their bread-and-butter series.
They have the breathing room to branch out into all kinds of game development precisely so they can funnel what they learn back into Pokémon.
If they were making Pokémon properly, I wouldn't care what else they did. But neglecting Pokémon to dabble in other stuff — and it turning out to be a bad game at that — is a problem.
If Monolith Soft took over, the Pokémon designs would probably get iffy too, and the characters' popularity would tilt toward a niche otaku crowd and decline. If Monolith were actually mainstream enough to be trusted with Pokémon, their own games would be selling a lot more than they do. Come back and say that once they've posted first-week worldwide sales of 5 million a few times.
At the very least I'd want to keep Sugimori on as supervisor.
That logic would hold up if Game Freak had multiple non-Pokémon titles hitting 5 million in first-week worldwide sales, but in reality almost everything outside of Pokémon has been a miss.
Depends how you play it. If it's the kind of thing with a massive load every time you open it, yeah, that'd be ridiculous.
Checking the weather isn't the point though. That's like saying it's pointless to open Pokémon GO just to look at the map.
Genshin Impact deliberately makes its background NPCs look as generic as possible, specifically so the gacha characters stand out and sell better.
Wait, do you have a source for Game Freak suing Palworld?
It's not something worth making a fuss over — it's just business as usual for Game Freak.
Sorry, justify what exactly, and who's doing the justifying?
Pokémon's running out of fresh ideas too, and with similar titles like Palworld, Animo, and Rokokin growing into big productions, it seems pretty normal to read this as Game Freak focusing on other titles out of a sense of crisis.
Not really normal — they've been doing this for ages regardless.
What exactly is running out of ideas?
Checking the weather forecast isn't mandatory, but… isn't sleeping mandatory?
I figured it would sync with smart band data, but no — you just open the app and it measures things the old-fashioned way. Total buzzkill.
Background and Points of Debate
Game Freak has a long track record of developing non-Pokémon titles alongside its main series — including “Drill Dozer,” “Pulseman,” “Tembo the Badass Elephant,” and “Pokémon Sleep,” which ties gameplay to a real-life habit — and “Rain Then Shine Girl” falls squarely within that tradition. It’s worth noting that the claim circulating in the thread that Game Freak “sued Palworld” is unsubstantiated and, as of September 2026, has not been officially confirmed. The disagreement in the thread comes down to differing evaluation criteria: some see non-Pokémon development as a waste of resources that distracts from the main business, while others see it as an investment that keeps the dev team’s morale up and helps attract new fans. Both sides point to the success or failure of past non-Pokémon titles as evidence, and the debate remains unresolved.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Game Freak Announces New Title ‘Rain Then Shine Girl’.”
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