Back in late 2016 Pokémon released Evolutions, a limited-run animated series to celebrate 20 years of the franchise with some short episodes that were completely free to watch on YouTube and can still be enjoyed in full here.

Five years later and the same is being done for the 25th anniversary. Pokémon Evolutions returns on 9th September for another eight episodes. The original run of the animation had many more episodes at 18, but each was only around four minutes in length. Hopefully this new version will have longer episodes to compensate.

Eight episodes was also chosen as each will will focus on a different region representing the mainline games. This will be done in reverse chronological order staring with Sword and Shield’s Galar region in episode one, and ending with the original Kanto region.

• September 9, 2021: “The Champion” featuring the Galar region
• September 23, 2021: “The Eclipse” featuring the Alola region
• October 7, 2021: “The Vision” featuring the Kalos region
• October 21, 2021: “The Plan” featuring the Unova region
• December 2, 2021: “The Rival” featuring the Sinnoh region
• December 9, 2021: “The Wish” featuring the Hoenn region
• December 16, 2021: “The Show” featuring the Johto region
• December 23, 2021: “The Quest” featuring the Kanto region

A trailer for the new episodes can be watched below and it features animation on par with the original, which was universally praised. The trailer mainly focuses on the Galar and Alola regions, however, so we don’t see much outside of the most recent two regions.

We have a suspicion that more trailers will be released after the first two episodes air. For the older regions we do get some flashes of them, such as the painted Lugia which seems to be part of a stage show in the header image above.

Pokémon Evolutions will be available to watch for free both on the official Pokémon YouTube channel and the Pokémon TV streaming service which just launched on the Nintendo Switch.