For the first time ever, the names of certain Pokémon species have been officially changed by The Pokemon Company. The name changes were made to Mimikyu, Porygon Z and Porygon-2, although the official reason for the name changes has not been detailed at this time.
The news comes from the official Weibo account for Pokémon (and if you’re not familiar, Weibo is a Chinese micro-blogging app similar to Twitter).
The change was shared to Twitter by user @JynxClub, who posted an image of the change, along with the words: “According to the official Pokemon Weibo account,
the Chinese names of several Pokemon are being changed.
“It was speculated that the name changes were due to the new regulations for game characters, in which the Chinese names of game characters can NOT contain English letters.”
As shown below, all three Pokemon originally had a mix of Chinese characters and English letters, while the new names either use exclusively Chinese characters or use Arabic numerals instead.
It’s purely speculative that the names changes were due to the new legislation that requires game character names to have no English letters in their names. For example, all three Pokemon mentioned in this article had a mixture of both English and Chinese letters, while the new updated names now have either Chinese characters or Arabic numerals.
Maybe we’ll see some confirmation as to why the Porygons and Mimikyu have seen a sudden change of name.
It’s an odd thing to happen, but then there’s a lot of oddness happening in the world right now.
Will we see further names of Pokémon changed in China? Only time will tell, but it is known that these name changes will not be enforced anywhere else in the world.
Featured Image Credit: Nintendo