We all know where this is going. The Pokemon bank has been delayed since its original release of December 27th. Since then Nintendo has kept a dead silence about the new release date. The cause of the bank's delay was cited as the unforeseen traffic from the Christmas holiday and the release of the bank in Japan.

The "pokebank" allows trainers to store up to 3000 pokemon on cloud saves. It is the only method of getting your beloved Pokemon from your older games into your current game and has a small subscription fee of 5$ a year with the first month being free to use. By far the biggest promise of all was that the bank would stop the transfer of hacked pokemon to the new game. This was supposed to improve the Pokemon economy and force trainers to make use of the new breeding innovations.

All of these things are great for the game and meta game. The community was pretty excited for it and generally looked favorably on it. But once again, Nintendo can't deliver on their online promises. The winter break has passed for most students and the holiday rush is long gone and we still can't move our Pokemon. We should have expected this though, Nintendo and the internet don't usually get along.

It seems like Nintendo only wants to deal with the internet in the most arbitrary and difficult ways. From the difficult use of Friend Codes to the baffling gauntlet of logins to register your Pokemon account online. I can't imagine very many people happy with the current state of affairs with the connectivity of the Nintendo consoles. I can't name a single game that I have played online from Nintendo since Mario Kart 7. Smash Bros. is way too shoddy online to function and few games allow you to interact with a community that is not on your friends list. They are sacrificing fun for safety and it's alienating a large market. Even when they do go online it is just archaic and bulky There are glimmers of hope though.

With the advent of the NintendoID it appears an effort is being made to streamline things. This ID ties together the wii, wii U, and 3DS for one account and puts your wallet together across all three consoles as well. A good step forward even with the shaky execution over Christmas. Now for the step backwards, The MiiVerse. An entity I can only describe as a forum without a use. I took one brief look at it on my 3DS, saw the list of what it was and left. I doubt I will ever open it again. I can smell the irritating menus on it from here. It is just another tool to try to use the Mii and it is wholly unnecessary.

I would like to see them treat online connectivity like they do StreetPass functionality. If they can make me as enthusiastic about online connectivity as I am about StreetPass I would be ecstatic. Simple, fun, easy to use, and it actually affects my game and gives me social interaction. Learn lessons from yourself Nintendo.

One day you are going to get it together and I just can not wait for that day.

Hang in There

-Chemystery