Pokémon Bank Is Closing, Which Is a Nightmare for My Autistic Brain

In approximately six months time, on February 26th 2027, Pokémon Bank for the 3DS will be shutting down.

I now have a limited amount of time to complete a years-long collectathon quest, or risk semi-permanent autistic stress around my inability to complete a collection.

I’ll kick this off with a bit of background on the role of Pokémon Bank, and why I think its disappearance is going to be so impactful to me when it happens.

Pokémon Bank is a 3DS application which allows players to, for a small fee, store their Pokémon online on a server, rather than directly on their game cartridges. This was potentially useful if you were worried about losing a cartridge or having a save file erased, but it was probably most useful as a portal to connect the 3DS and Switch era Pokémon games.

Players who caught a Pokémon in a 3DS game (or transferred one forward to 3DS via a DS title), could move them from Pokémon Bank on 3DS to Pokémon Home on Switch, allowing for potentially decades old collections of Pokémon to be brought forward to modern era Pokémon games, rather than being eternally stranded on older hardware.

This also allowed Rare Pokémon, in some cases only available in older titles, to be brought into the future of the series.

Shiny Pokémon are randomly occurring colour variant creatures. Starting at roughly 1/8000 odds of appearing in early series titles, and moving to around 1/4000 odds in more modern games, these creatures don’t do anything special, but their unique colour scheme makes them desirable to collect.

While there are methods in more modern titles to improve your odds of encountering a shiny Pokémon, at its most simple shiny hunting involves encountering the same Pokémon species repeatedly, over and over, hoping that you’ll luck out and see a creature play a little sparkle animation and spawn in sporting some funky new colour scheme after hours of attempts.

For the past 9 years I have been attempting to complete a Living OT Shiny National Dex. That basically means I am attempting to capture one shiny of every single species of Pokémon in the series history (minus those that are prevented from being shiny in the game code).

I’m getting pretty close at this point. Out of 1025 species of Pokémon (minus the shiny locked species, and then add on the alternate forms and regional variants), there’s only 62 shiny Pokémon left that I need to collect to fill out my collection.

At this point, most of those are Pokémon that I can only shiny hunt in the 3DS games. That puts a pretty strict deadline on me to obsessively and repeatedly put hundreds of hours into completing my Shiny Collection, before I lose my ability to do so.

Some of these Pokémon can literally only be shiny hunted on the 3DS games, such as the Pokémon Type: Null, which needs to be reset for in Ultra Sun or Ultra Moon. Some Pokémon can be hunted elsewhere, but are hugely time consuming to do so, such as Legendaries and Ultra Beasts which are best hunted in Ultra Wormholes, rather than on Sword and Shield’s Dynamax Adventures. Some need to be hunted through really obscure means, such as Shiny Wish Maker Jirachi, only available via a Pokémon Colosseum Gamecube bonus disc, and a series of other transfers.

And I’ll acknowledge, some of these Pokémon can be encountered shiny via Pokémon Go, but in some cases only if you paid real world money for a limited time special event that happened in the past and has not at any point been rerun. Going back to Jirachi for example, if you spent money on an in game event in Pokémon Go in June of 2025, you would get a quest to eventually unlock a shiny Jirachi. I paid for the event when it was released, and a year later am still only on step 1 of 6 in trying to unlock this shiny Jirachi. Anyone who didn’t pay for that event last year and wants a shiny Jirachi today will need to get one via that Gabecube bonus disc, and transfering eventually through Pokémon Bank. 

Pokémon Go may in theory give me the option to fill a couple of those remaining slots in my shiny collection, but generally speaking there’s easily 40+ species of Pokémon that I can only Shiny Hunt right now on 3DS, even if I spend money in Pokémon Go to get some species, and use some really sub-optimal hunting methods on Switch for some of the legendaries.

So, there’s 6 months left for me to grab these Pokémon, or essentially be locked away from accessing them forever… maybe.

Look, on paper I know that these Pokémon will probably be available as shiny forms at some point in the future. A lot of the 3DS era Pokémon that have never appeared in a Switch era game, or have been shiny locked in the Switch era games, could well show up in the series next mainline entries Winds and Waves. Nintendo could over the next few years rerelease all the DS and 3DS era Pokémon games on Switch as overpriced roms. There will probably at some nebulous point in the future be a way to capture these creatures, shiny, if I don’t do it before the end of February next year.

But the problem is I don’t know that for certain, and that’s genuinely causing me a lot of autistic distress.

As someone diagnosed autistic, I don’t deal well with uncertainty and unpredictability. Even when I know logically, on paper, that the chances are high that something will work out, the inability to be certain causes me to feel physically anxious. This feeling of physical anxiety is worse when it’s related to something meaningful, like a nearly 30 year long autistic special interest. It’s even more intense when it’s related to something that I’ve put a lot of time and effort into, such as putting literal thousands and thousands of hours into trying to complete a perfect collection without any gaps in it.

The idea that 6 months from now there may be a gap in my shiny Pokémon collection, with no way for me to fill it and no idea when that might change, is really causing me some undue stress, and I’m having to take some time to process that.

I may look from the outside like I handle being autistic pretty well. That’s in part because I tend to not broadcast the worst moments of my struggles with the condition onto the internet, and part because I have found coping mechanisms for when I’m most struggling. Shiny Hunting has been one of my main coping mechanisms as an autistic person these past 9 years – It’s socially acceptable within gaming spaces, I can turn it into work content, and I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time because I’m working toward a goal. When the world is difficult for me to predictably control, when I can’t do everything exactly the way that I planned, when the world is too much, repeatedly encountering the same creature over and over for hours is really good at helping me to settle down my fight or flight response.

I’m genuinely not looking forward to an autistic safety activity, something I’ve done for years to help manage my autism symptoms, likely becoming a source of autistic uncertainty in the not so distant future. 

How will I cope when the thing that I used to fall back on when approaching meltdown or overload becomes itself a source of “I physically can’t complete this” stress?

How will I manage the first time that my brain fixates on the fact I want to complete my shiny collection, but can’t, even though that’s all that I want to work on doing in that moment? 

I could in theory just continue to work on catching these Pokémon on the 3DS, knowing I’ll never be able to bring them forward to the Switch games, but that isn’t how I planned to do this, so it’s not going to feel correct. 

Counterintuatively, that’ll probably make me feel worse. I’ll then have the shiny Pokémon that I need, but I won’t be able to move it over to the Switch games, leaving it forever in the wrong place. That’s not likely to help, for me.

I have a 3DS capture card for PC, so I’ll probably soon start streaming Shiny Hunting attempts on Twitch in the hopes that I can complete this quest before that upcoming deadline.

I know that there’s a good chance I will fail.

I’m obviously not trying to argue that Nintendo should delay the closure of Pokémon Bank on my account, or give me any special continued access to it because I’m autistic. I understand that those are not likely outcomes to see from a huge corporation.

What I do hope, however, is that Nintendo recognizes there are people like me out here who are feeling stressed about the upcoming closure of Pokémon Bank, and before that deadline arrives I hope that they announce plans which will allow those creatures to be attainable on Switch systems. 

My big hope is the rollout of ports of the DS and 3DS era games, or at least announced plans at some point to roll those out in the future. 

Failing that, I’m just going to have to accept an imperfect decade long collection, at least until things change.