Approval of God: The Galarian forms of Zigzagoon, Linoone, and the Galarian-exclusive evolution Obstagoon bear more than a striking resemblance to and are clearly inspired by KISS's black and white makeup and leather-clad metal armor. Band frontman Gene Simmons, who is notorious for taking legal action against parodies and rip-offs of the band's likeness, is a fan of the series and is actually cool with the designs.
Ascended Fanon: The common fan theory of gym leaders have multiple teams that are level scaled to the challenger is used as the gym leaders faced in the Champion Cup and rematches have different teams at different levels.
Blooper: Eagle-eyed players noticed a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance of a mouse cursor during the end credits, as the camera pans behind the drumming Rillaboom. Similar instances of this were later found in other cutscenes as well.
One 4chan post on May 23rd leaked various elements of the games before their official reveal, managing to accurately predict many new mons, the new gimmick, Galar variants, and many new characters before their respective reveals.
Over the weekend of November 1st-3rd, just under two weeks before the game's release, screenshots both from the game and the strategy guide began flooding the internet, revealing basically the game's entire roster of Pokémon, both new and old. The scale of these leaks as well as the increased scrutiny towards Sword and Shield that followed caused Nintendo to launch a full-blown investigation into the leaks, eventually tracing them to an employee for the Portuguese Nintendo fansite FNintendo, who had leaked the content from their review copy of the game. As a result, Nintendo permanently cut ties with the website, and the leaker was fired from their job.
On November 11th, just four days before the official release, physical copies of the game began finding their way into players' hands, as while the digital download of the game was locked behind a key that wouldn't be generated until the release date, the physical copies had no such restrictions, leading to spoilers going all out.
The first DLC, the Isle of Armor, released on June 17th. Soon afterwards dataminers discovered that Gamefreak had completely failed to scrub data regarding the second DLC, the Crown Tundra, from the Isle of Armor's patch, revealing the existence of, among other things, the then-unannounced Glastrier and Spectrier.
Dummied Out: Besides the usual load of unused items that are carried over to each game, there are some specific notable examples of such content:
Gigantamax forms for Snorlax, Toxtricity, and Melmetal were discovered in the games code, but weren't available when the game released. The former two were first released via Raid Battle events, and were also able to be obtained with the advent of Max Soup in the Isle of Armor expansion. However, Gigantamax Melmetal remained unobtainable, even with the addition of Max Soup (you couldn't even feed it to Melmetal), until a special Pokémon Home event in late 2020.
Eternatus's Eternamax form exists in the game as a proper Pokémon, complete with a colossal 1125 base stat total. However, it can never be obtained by the player in the game proper, as it was intended to solely be a Boss Fight.
Prior to an event in February 2020 which had both of them as drops from G-Max capable Milcery, the Ribbon and Star Sweets were unavailable to be obtained normally, locking out the respective Alcremie variants. As of the Isle of Armor expansion, the Star and Ribbon sweets can also be crafted via the Cram-o-Matic.
The game has text implying that the ability Ripen enhances the health gained from the Leftovers item. However, in actual gameplay, Ripen has no effect on how much health a Pokémon gains from Leftovers.
Ultra Necrozma is entirely absent from the data due to the removal of Z-Crystals, but its cry remains present, possibly as an artifact of importing Necrozma's data.
Fandom Nod: An official 1/4 scale Dracovish plush called "Fishious Rend! Dracovish" released by Takara Tomy is described as having its Signature Move Fishious Rend, having the ability Strong Jaw, and can be purchased in a bundle with a Choice Scarf or Choice Band, all referencing Dracovish's sheer ubiquity in competitive Pokémon and its most common competitive sets.
God Never Said That: Following game journalists revealing that the levels of the Isle of Armor's opponents would scale in accordance to the player's progress through the game, someone posted on Twitter that she had asked a Nintendo rep about whether or not the scenario would scale to meet level 100 Pokémon and was told that they would. Come the release of the DLC, and it's discovered that level scaling is in no way tied to the levels of the Pokémon in the player's party and is capped at ranges between 55 and 75 for anyone who has become Champion.
Japanese fans got to decide their local name of Steel Beam — a Steel-type move that does massive special damage but halves the user's HP — via CoroCoro Magazine's May 2019 issue. This is similar to Draco Meteor years ago.
A t-shirt design contest by UNIQLO promised that all winning shirts would be officially produced and available in stores, in addition to the grand winner getting their t-shirt in the game. While that t-shirt was disqualified for being sold elsewhere beforehand, and another shortly after once it came to light that it was using stolen fanart, the rest were still made, and arrived in stores late June.
Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Shortly following the games' release, alleged screenshots from Pokémon Masters spread around where Iris states that Leon is her cousin and Blue states he isn't allowed to bring his Pidgeot to the Galar region due to its strict limitations on which Pokémon can enter the region. Both of these screenshots ended up being fake.
Refitted for Sequel: Farfetch'd was originally planned◊ to receive a new evolution during the development of Pokémon Gold and Silver, which ended up being scrapped among several other beta Pokémon. Although Sirfetch'd is a mostly new design, it does take a couple beats off of the original design, such as sporting a lighter color scheme than Farfetch'd and now holding its leek in its feathers to use as a weapon.
Trolling Creator: Throughout pre-release marketing of Pokémon Sword & Shield, Game Freak made a point to show Impidimp but not officially reveal it. They even exploited the trope for the 24-hour livestream on October 4th, 2019, where Impidimp walked towards the camera, obscuring a good look at Galarian Ponyta in the process. Come the following Wednesday, only Galarian Ponyta was officially revealed, but still not Impidimp.
Troubled Production: In a 2022 CEDEC presentation, Game Freak developers revealed that the team ran into problems with the game engine they had built for the Nintendo Switch; notably, it took 40 minutes to compile the code every time a new asset was added, which limited the amount of content that could be added to the game and was the primary factor behind the infamous Dex cut.
The grand winner of UNIQLO's t-shirt design contest, a Magikarp and Gyarados pattern, was going to be put in the game, with there even being edited screenshots to show what it would look like. However, the winner got disqualified when the pattern was discovered to be commercially available elsewhere, and a replacement design wasn't picked despite the other entries following the rules, meaning no real shirt in the game.
Peonia from the Crown Tundra DLC is never fought in the game, but datamining revealed that she has a complete battle entry animation in the files, implying she could be battled at some point in development and it was possibly cut late.
Beta versions of the game shows the following:
UI elements imply that Rotom Dex was planned to return. Instead, it got turned into Rotom Phone. There is also a graphic that shows a "female" version of the Rotom Dex in the files. The "female" version would later be remodeled as Rotomi as Gloria can be seen with the regular Rotom Dex.
A minimap, possibly intended to resemble Alola's Rotom Dex, was going to be visible on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
Route 7 originally featured a statue or a carving of a Pokémon on one side of the bridge. In the final version you can see a bare cliff.
The Turffield Stadium pitch is fully rendered and collision-mapped. It's possible that originally the player was allowed to freely wander the pitch and interact with the Gym Leader's model to start the battle, before restricting control to just the corridor leading to the pitch in the final versions.
Max Raids in the Wild Area beta map are accessed by interacting with some trees. If this was an intended feature and not a placeholder, this means that traces of it are left in the DLC as Mythology Gags.note (minor spoilers) Said traces are the Vespiquen you face alongside Hop during the plot of The Isle of Armor, and the bonus Level 100 Greedent you can face in The Crown Tundra. Both of those events are indeed triggered after interacting with special trees. There is also a giant Joltik placed in front of the entrance to Motostoke, potentially indicating that a scripted Raid event was supposed to happen there (maybe even as a tutorial for the Raid mechanic).
The map for the Tower Summit includes what may be a beta model for Eternatus, which looks like a skeletal, winged fish instead of a skeletal crystalline dragon.
The cutscene that introduces the Gym Leaders was originally meant to have an additional scene that focuses on the protagonist and their three rivals approaching the Gym Leaders and staring them down, mirroring the artwork of Victor staring down Milo.
There's an unused item called "band autograph" in the files, with the description stating that it's the autograph of the members of the all-Pokémon band called "The Maximisers" who play after you win the Galar Elite Tournament. It was likely a part of a cut sidequest.
It seems like Sonia, Professor Magnolia, Chairman Rose (in his casual outfit), Cara Liss (the scientist responsible for reviving the fossils), and Ball Guy were supposed to be fought at some point, since there are unused Trainer classes in the game that relate to them. Sonia and Magnolia were possibly supposed to be fought multiple times during the story, since there are Trainer classes associated with them with and without their labcoats.
General Trivia
These are the first games to use an official Japanese version of the famous blue-and-yellow international logo of the franchise. Here's a comparison of the game's Japanese and English logos for proof, and here's◊ the new Japanese logo by itself.
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