It’s time for my weekly Pokémon TCG sealed product price watch. Suprise suprise, the secondary market in TCGPlayer is giving big box retailers like Amazon a run for their money. Let’s just keep in mind that TCGPlayer is a marketplace, so this is small to medium sellers undercutting billion and trillion dollar companies here.

TL;DR: Deals for Today

I’ll give it to Amazon, some in-demand products are cheaper on there today too, we’re talking Mega Evolution sealed product, Black Bolt and even a premium collection ex box. Don’t forget that Pokémon Legends: Z-A drops on Thursday too, and I’ve got all the preorder links you’ll need above and below. There’s a song in that somewhere? Let’s get into it:

Cheapest at Amazon: Pokémon TCG

Kicking off with the Mega Evolution Elite Trainer Box, we know $92.65 isn’t MSRP and Amazon should be selling it as such, but this is how it is in Pokémania 2025 for now. It’s 7% below the current market value and a good deal if you’re struggling to get stock. Meanwhile the Mega Evolution three pack blister is only a dollar cheaper, but that dollar is better in your pocket. The other savings range between $1 to $5, so fill your boots!

Cheapest at TCGPlayer: Pokémon TCG

TCGPlayer is really showing up big box retailers. The secondary market is saving trainers a fortune right now, and will continue doing so until the Pokémon Company floods the marketplace with sealed product, which will happen eventually. A good example here is the Surging Sparks ETB, which is currently $92.94 on Amazon. If you check over on TCGPlayer right now, you’ll pay $74.95. That’s nearly $20 over market value, and there’s plenty more where that came from in the carosel above.

MTG: TMNT Preorders are Live

New game mode aside, MTGs latest Universes Beyond addition is another huge IP with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Play Boosters are available, so getting a box is a great idea before preorders sell out and it becomes harder to build a deck. The Commander Deck is ideal if you want a solid foundation for a game of Commander but want to modify it with single cards down the line. Of course, the TMNT bundle comes with a few goodies including 9 play boosters, foil alt art promo card, 30 land cards and some tidy accessories.

Pokémon Legends: L-A Preorders

It’s nearly time trainers! Thursday see’s the release of the most radiacally different mainline Pokémon game, Legends: Z-A. Set as a continuation of Pokémon X and Y and continuing the game mechanic changes seen in Legends: Arceus, Legends: Z-A is going full real-time combat over it’s tried and tested turn-based battle style. It’s going to be a landmark moment for the worlds most popular entertainment franchise, so make sure you have your preorder in.

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (3 Months)

Final Fantasy IX (Nintendo Switch)

Assassin’s Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Côté has departed Ubisoft after a career spanning more than 20 years, IGN understands.

The news comes just two weeks after Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft’s biggest brand, became operated by Vantage Studios, the separate business entity formed by Ubisoft with a 25% stake from Chinese giant Tencent that will also now oversee all future Far Cry and Rainbow Six games.

Ubisoft staff were informed of the news this afternoon via an internal email which simultaneously discussed the need for Vantage Studios’ leadership team to be “aligned” with its core goals, while wishing Côté well for the future. IGN understands that Côté was offered a role as part of Vantage Studios’ leadership, but declined.

In an internal note to Ubisoft staff obtained by IGN, Vantage Studios co-CEO Christophe Derennes said he was “disappointed” by Côté’s decision, and that the former leader “had his own expectations and priorities related to Vantage Studios’ creation and future.”

“Following the organizational restructuring announced in March 2025, Marc-Alexis Côté has chosen to pursue a new path elsewhere outside of Ubisoft,” a Ubisoft spokesperson told IGN today. “While we are saddened to see him go, we’re confident that our talented teams will carry forward the strong foundation he helped build.

“We are deeply grateful for the impact Marc-Alexis has had over the years, particularly in shaping the Assassin’s Creed brand into what it is today. His leadership, creativity, and dedication have left a lasting mark on our teams and our players. We thank him sincerely for his many contributions and wish him continued success in all his future endeavors.”

Côté, known internally by his initials as Mac, joined Ubisoft in 2005 as a software engineer, before working as a lead engine programmer on Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. From there, he joined the Assassin’s Creed series in time for Brotherhood, working as a lead level designer, before serving as a game director on Assassin’s Creed 3.

As creative director, Côté led development on a string of projects built at Ubisoft Quebec, the talented team which made Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag DLC Freedom Cry, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, and then Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, for which Côté served as senior producer.

In March 2022, as Quebec worked on Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Ubisoft sought to relaunch the series with a more consistent story focus via the Animus Hub (then referred to as Assassin’s Creed Infinity), it was Côté that took the reigns on the entire franchise, laying out a Marvel-style slate of upcoming projects that included the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed Hexe, which still lacks a release date.

More to follow…

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

When Pokémon Legends: Z-A was first revealed, we all immediately got to work speculating on when it would take place in the Pokémon timeline. Not where, we knew that: it takes place entirely in Lumiose City from Pokémon X and Y’s Kalos region. But given that Legends: Arceus was a time-traveling narrative going back hundreds of years into Sinnoh’s past, we had every expectation based on trailers that Z-A would be many, many years in Lumiose City’s future.

We were incorrect! We now know exactly when it takes place, and it’s not nearly as big a leap as you’d think.

We’ve been playing Pokémon Legends: Z-A for review and the embargo has now lifted. So we can confirm, from first-hand experience talking to multiple characters (most of which we unfortunately can’t directly cite or show due to the ongoing embargo restrictions), that Z-A takes place just five years after the events of X and Y. It’s not a time traveling narrative, it’s a direct sequel that offers a follow-up to many of the characters and situations introduced in X and Y.

For instance, we already know that you get to hang out with AZ, a 3,000-year-old man who plays a pivotal role in X and Y. We also know that Mable, a former member of Team Flare, takes on the role of Pokémon professor in this game and sends you out to catch Pokémon with various challenges. Other characters you’ll remember from X and Y show up as well, some of them dramatically changed, but we can’t and won’t spoil them just yet.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A being a direct sequel is actually a pretty big deal. The Pokémon universe has been real hand-wavey with how the different games and regions relate to one another over the years. While there have been some direct sequels before (Gold and Silver after Red and Blue, Black and White 2 after Black and White, etc), later games have introduced time travel (Legends: Arceus), alternative universes (Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire), and basically every game has implied that all the other games’ locations and monsters exist in the same world, but events taking place in those games may or may not be canon depending on which one you’re playing. The Pokémon timeline, if drawn out, probably looks far more ridiculous than the Zelda one at this point.

But if you were wondering what happened to most of the main cast of X and Y five years after the events of the game, here you go: this is just a straightforward sequel! In hindsight, we should have seen this coming when they named it “Z-A” after X and Y.

My review-in-progress of Pokémon Legends: Z-A is now live, if you want to check out my impressions of the first 24 hours, with a full review coming next week. I’ve also been writing about how the Nurse Joy job is now open to people who don’t look exactly identical to the original Nurse Joy after 27 years in Z-A.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Review codes for Pokémon Legends: Z-A were only sent out less than a week ago, but I’ve already put in around 24 hours or so in the last five days. Across that time I’ve been catching every new species of Pokémon I find, doing every side quest that pops up, and stopping every so often to completely change my outfit. I’ve currently got a full team all in the level 50s, and I can’t wait to stop writing this review-in-progress to go play more. It’s real good so far!

Ah, feels nice to say that after, uh… this.

There are a few reasons why I don’t feel comfortable scoring Z-A right now. Apart from simply not having beaten it yet, the embargo we’re publishing this under is pretty strict about what we can and can’t say or show. We always try to avoid spoilers (and recent leaks mean plenty are already in the wild), but here we can’t even talk about basic plot details that happen literally in the first 10 minutes. We can’t mention loads of the specific Pokémon in Z-A, despite the fact that any number of them might casually roam across our footage at any time. We can’t even show you the map of Lumiose City, where everything in Z-A takes place. It’s difficult to say exactly how close to the credits 24 hours puts me, but I’ll likely be back with my final, scored review shortly after launch.

We also haven’t had the chance to test it on Nintendo Switch 1 ahead of time, although I am at least so happy to report that Pokémon Legends: Z-A runs great on Nintendo Switch 2. It glides along at a smooth framerate with very, very few hitches or hiccups. There is occasionally still some sudden pop-in of NPCs, including ones positioned very close to the player, and here and there I’ve seen a character do that creepy thing where their head and neck suddenly snap into place as I get closer. But critically, unlike Scarlet and Violet, none of this is horribly distracting, nor does it really detract from the overall experience. Because of Scarlet and Violet, I spent the first 20 minutes or so paying close attention to whether or not Z-A ran well. But then, after that, I barely thought about it again, a state of mind which I consider ideal. Here’s hoping that’s still the case with the Switch 1 version, which I will take into consideration as part of my final review either way.

Running well doesn’t equate to a game being pretty, of course, and Z-A isn’t going to win any beauty contests. Lumiose City looks fine. Its buildings are covered with mostly flat images of the same couple of window and terrace patterns over and over again. Up close, the effect is pretty weird – like someone painted a Looney Tunes door on a wall so Roadrunner would crash into it. The samey buildings are broken up with occasional trees, battle courts, parks, and the same bench copy-pasted about 100 times. There’s a greyish sewer system with greyish water running through it, and rooftops occasionally interrupted by same-looking cafe set-ups.

That said, I do think that the reduced scale of the world has worked in Game Freak’s favor with Z-A when compared to, say, Arceus or Scarlet and Violet. The city is smaller, so it’s more densely packed with trainers, Pokémon, items, shops, and other actually interesting things to see and do. I’m not running for minutes on end through massive fields of flat, GameCube-style textures, with nary a point of interest in sight. As a result, similar to Z-A’s performance, it was easy to stop thinking about the low-quality building design fairly early on.

That’s also helped by the fact that building interiors and the character and Pokémon models themselves look pretty good, and the human characters in particular are more varied than ever before. While almost every NPC you meet in the city is categorized by trainer type and given an appearance to match, Game Freak is now experimenting not just with diverse facial features and skin tones, but also clothing items. We saw some of this in Scarlet and Violet, but almost everyone was wearing school uniforms, so it wasn’t nearly as noticeable. Now, you might see two athletic trainers wearing differently colored versions of the same athletic gear, or two artists with different colored aprons.

Small a touch as this sounds, combining that with facial differences does a lot to make Lumiose City feel inhabited by many different, diverse people instead of the same 10 trainer types repeated ad nauseum. That customizability extends to the protagonist, too. There are tons of hair, facial, and fashion choices to choose from, including new options to mix and match certain types of outfits (different undershirts with different jackets, for instance). It’s a massively refreshing improvement after spending most of Pokémon Violet expressing myself via the same four ugly purple uniforms and a variety of mismatched hats.

Another element that I think elevates Lumiose City far above the much larger overworld of Scarlet and Violet is that it’s dense with interesting landmarks, items, obstacle courses, stores, Wild Zones, shops, and people. Lumiose is round, with different streets running out from the center like wheel spokes, and the entirety of it is open to you within just a few hours of starting your journey. You can, if you want, scour the whole map very early on, though it won’t be especially interesting at first blush. But over time, you’ll gradually unlock new ways to get around and new things to see when you get there: a new travel method that lets you scale scaffolding to collect rare items at the top, new ways to get onto buildings and Assassin’s Creed your way to little nooks of the city you couldn’t quite reach before, and new Wild Areas teeming with new Pokémon to catch. That steady unlocking of a city you always had free reign of adds to the feeling of getting to know a new place you’ve just moved to.

Exploration is often rewarded, too. While I criticized Scarlet and Violet for just sort of slapping large quantities of Pokémon haphazardly over a big map, especially in later areas, every single spawn location in Lumiose City feels deliberate and well-considered. A line of trash bins might not have anything interesting to see when you pass by on one visit, but there could be a Trubbish on top the next. Flocks of Pidgey and Fletchling scatter as you dash into a courtyard. Spinarak regard you calmly while hanging from tree branches. If you really explore, you might encounter a rare dragon-type on a rooftop (the embargo forbids me from saying which one despite the fact that its evolutions have been confirmed for the game already); a Spritzee floating idly in a hidden cafe; once, I turned just in time to see an Eevee sprint past me into an alleyway, and I barely threw a PokeBall quickly enough to catch it.

I won’t (and can’t) spoil too much of the story, but what I can talk about is the interesting rhythm it establishes that feels, in practice, quite different from any other Pokémon game so far. Like Arceus, Z-A foregoes the traditional “gather eight badges” structure, though here you’ll divide their time between day and night – during the day, you’ll be catching Pokémon in Wild Zones, battling rogue Mega Evolved Pokémon, performing goofy side quest errands for individuals around the city, shopping, and exploring. At night, you have the option to visit Battle Zones where you take on trainers and complete challenges to raise your score and eventually collect a Challenger’s Ticket, which unlocks your promotion match for the next level of the “Z-A Royale.” There are 26 ranks total, one for each letter of the alphabet. I am currently at rank D, though I wish this was slightly more fleshed out as a proper competitive mode rather than just a story vehicle – for instance, you don’t exactly spend a meaningful amount of time at every single one of the 26 letter ranks.

I’ll have more to say on this in the final review, free from my embargo shackles, but I am really enjoying the story so far. Ditching the eight badge trainer journey like Arceus before it allows Game Freak to flesh out a deeper, more interesting cast of characters, both the heroes and the villains. There’s simply more reason for them to be where you are, doing things alongside you and participating in the world-changing events you’re experiencing. I’m also fascinated by how much Z-A appears to be inspired by the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. The enclosed city setting, the absurd and silly tone of the side quests, the story’s concerns with community and civic issues, and the protagonist bopping around a metro area solving problems by being absurdly stronger than everyone else all lend Lumiose City big Kamurocho energy.

Which leads me to the meat and potatoes of any Pokémon game: the battling. With Z-A, Pokémon has gone full action game. Not a turn-based battle in sight. While I don’t think I want Pokémon to fully depart from doing turn-based combat forever, this works pretty well as a detour. Game Freak did an admirable job translating its traditional battle system into one that works in an active-time environment, especially with moves seemingly so specific to the turn-based format. Protect and Detect now stop damage for a set period of time instead of one “turn.” Spikes dumps, well, spikes all over the floor in an area, forcing you to steer your Pokémon out of it. Long-range moves keep Pokémon out of harm’s way, but take longer to execute and recharge than more risky, short-range ones.

There are a lot of new tactics and strategies to mess around with, such as how movement and dodging works. You control your trainer directly, and can either hold ZL to open the move select menu to send your active Pokémon into the fray, or release it to have them follow you around, allowing you to guide them while dodging. This makes for an interesting combat flow as I strategize around calling my Pokémon back to me to dodge an attack, then positioning them ideally to set up their next move before the opponent can swing again. The system is a bit awkward at times, especially in enclosed areas, but I’m interested to see what a competitive meta looks like with this format.

These tactics grow even more critical and chaotic in boss battles with Rogue Mega Evolved Pokémon, of which Z-A has many. These battles all take place in uniform, wide, circular arenas, but the Pokémon themselves are far from ordinary. Rogue Mega Evolved Pokémon are essentially Z-A’s answer to Arceus’ Frenzied Noble Pokémon. In addition to their regular movesets, they each have additional unique abilities you’ll have to avoid, such as turning the arena into a bullet hell you have to dodge around, or suddenly appearing right in front of you for an attack. Like in Arceus, your trainer can get hit and even die (sorry, I mean “black out”) if they’re attacked too many times by an enemy Pokémon, and that becomes a legit concern as Rogue Megas will enrage partway through and try to attack you directly.

The best way to counter this is to Mega Evolve your own Pokémon or use “Plus” moves, which are superpowered versions of regular moves that also consume the energy you need to Mega Evolve. Unlike in Pokémon X and Y, where you could get away with fighting Mega Evolved Pokémon with regular monsters, you really do need to engage with the Mega mechanics in Z-A. Though it starts off pretty tame, Z-A quickly ramps up the difficulty – even doing every side quest, I’m still finding its boss battles will make me sweat a little.

Man, I was going to try and hold back a bit on this review-in-progress since I still have plenty to see before my final review, but I’m just so genuinely excited about what Game Freak has done here. I liked Arceus a fair amount and thought it showed promise, but have been broadly disappointed with the slow backslide I saw from the studio in its move to console game development, and worried the quality dip was a new trend for 3D Pokémon games that we’d never escape. Pokémon Legends: Z-A, at least across the first two-dozen hours, is putting a lot of my fears to rest. It’s not revolutionary by any stretch, but it’s really good! I’m having fun, I’m excited to keep playing, I feel rewarded for exploring every corner, the story’s got my attention, and I’m not distracted by my Pokémon falling through the floor while they battle or everything crashing when I try to climb a ladder. If the rest of my adventure holds up (and the Switch 1 performance isn’t a disaster), we could finally have a 3D game worthy of the Pokémon franchise on our hands. It’d be about dang time.

Fallout creator Tim Cain has continued his insightful video series on the development of the original Fallout game, this time focusing on lore with a number of fun reveals that have got fans talking.

Cain, the creator, producer, lead programmer and one of the main designers of Interplay’s 1997 post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout, released a video in which he talked about lore in the original Fallout that the team assumed was true but was never directly stated.

This “non-expository Fallout lore,” as Cain calls it, is lore from the first game only, lore the original team discussed among themselves and decided was true, and then made the game based on that. “None of this was written down” by any one of the 15 core people who developed Fallout, Cain said.

As a result, it is “not canon.”

“This is stuff that was true in the first game, but because it doesn’t exist in a design document anywhere, Bethesda is free to invent different reasons that the things that are in the game exist,” he prefaced. “I’m not canon, not anymore. You’re not canon just because you played the game or like it a lot. Bethesda’s canon. You don’t have to like that. You don’t have to like that water’s wet. I don’t like that white chocolate exists, but it does. So there we go.”

Why China nuked first

Top of the list is the explanation for why China nuked first. This is in reference to Fallout’s Great War, which took place on October 23, 2077 (Bethesda now hosts showcases on October 23 each year, aka Fallout Day). Cain had already said China nuked first in a previous video, putting to bed decades of fan speculation. But in this latest video he explained why China nuked first.

“This is not canon, but let me explain what I mean and why we thought that,” he began. “In the original game we had established FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus) and that the U.S. was doing bio-weapons research. We weren’t supposed to. In fact, we had signed a UN treaty saying we wouldn’t do that, and I think you can find that out in the game. China discovered that we were doing it. How did they discover it? Espionage. But they found out we were doing it, and we went, ‘Oops our bad, we won’t do that anymore.’ But we kept right on doing it, we just moved the research to another base. It was the hidden base that’s in The Glow, where you eventually discover ZAX the supercomputer.

“When China found out we were still doing it and we had just moved, well they had already tried diplomacy and espionage and none of that was working, so they just nuked us. They nuked us. We nuked back. Other countries nuked because all we saw, all anyone saw, were missiles flying.

“China technically started it by firing the first nuke. But you could argue that the U.S. technically started it by doing illegal bioweapons research and then lying about it multiple times.”

And what of Russia’s involvement? Cain went on to explain that the development team assumed Russia in the ‘90s (and therefore in the ‘50s projected future in the Fallout alternate history timeline), had broken up to become “a bunch of little bickering states.” The EU had unified, and the U.S. had annexed Canada (a prediction not lost on Cain given current events). “But anyway, we were kind of on friendly relations with Russia in the Fallout universe,” he added.

This is why one of Fallout’s pre-made characters is Natalia, the granddaughter of a Russian diplomat. “Obviously, we were friendly enough with the Russian embassy that they got some of their diplomats into one of the vaults, the vault you’re in,” Cain explained. “So, obviously, this wasn’t a country we were at odds with.”

The Vault 13 lottery

So, that explains the unspoken lore behind why China nuked first. But Cain had a lot more lore to reveal. It turns out that the three pre-made characters the player could choose from were in fact selected via a lottery by the inhabitants of Vault 13 — a lottery that was rigged.

“We had three pre-made characters in Fallout,” he went on. “There was Max, who was the big dumb idiot combat guy. There was Natalia, who was the dextrous thief kind of character. And then there was Albert, who was the smooth talking manipulator talkie guy.

“If you look at those three characters, you may go, that’s the best the vault had to offer? No, the vault did a lottery. They basically drew straws. They knew they had to send someone out. So they had people draw straws and whoever drew the short straw had to go out into what was presumed to be a radioactive wilderness that would kill them. But hopefully they would get back before the radiation killed them with a water chip replacement.

“This was just assumed. The pre-made characters support it. I believe there’s some dialogue here and here that kind of supports that no-one chose, especially if you play Max, no-one chose for that character to go. That wasn’t their first choice. That wasn’t even their best choice. That wouldn’t even been anywhere near the choice.

“Except one thing we also talked about and laughed about as also possibly being true was that the entire lottery for who leaves the vault was rigged. And that would explain those three characters. You have this guy who’s an idiot. Why would you send him out? Well, gets him out of the genepool. Then you have Natalia who’s stealing everything. Probably had pissed people off because she had stolen other people’s stuff. She’s gone. Albert was always trying to manipulate everybody because he’s such a smooth talker. He’s gone. So getting rid of these characters was probably high on someone’s list.”