Mobile games have, coincidentally, not been a major focus for Game Freak over the years. Even though Pokemon, and many of Game Freak’s other games, have been handheld-console releases, mobile has always been outside the company’s focus. Over the past decade, Game Freak has instead released games including HarmoKnight, Tembo the Badass Elephant, Giga Wrecker, and Little Town Hero on other platforms. There is one game, however, that Game Freak believes fits well on iOS.

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In 2013, Game Freak released a game named Pocket Card Jockey on Nintendo 3DS. An iOS and Android release followed a year later, though both releases were exclusive to Japan at the time. Western ports were eventually released in 2016, but only for the 3DS version of Pocket Card Jockey. It left a question whether the horse-racing card game could have found a larger audience if it had been released worldwide on iOS. That’s a question Game Freak now plans to answer.

Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! has been announced for release via the iOS platform’s Apple Arcade subscription service on January 20. The new version of Pocket Card Jockey will feature updated 3D graphics for the racing portion of the game, but will otherwise keep the rules of the original game. In other words, Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! remains a solitaire game at heart, with a meta-experience revolving around horse breeding and racing.

No context has been provided for why Game Freak is deciding to bring Pocket Card Jockey back, 10 years later. It’s probably as simple as Game Freak pitched the idea to Apple Arcade, and it was approved. Pocket Card Jockey will hopefully find an audience on iOS that it wasn’t able to find on 3DS.

Game Freak’s independent projects have slowed to a crawl since the 2019 release of Little Town Hero. It has been entirely focused on Pokemon games since then, which is understandable given the franchise’s leap to open-world experiences. Perhaps Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On!’s release on iOS on January 20 indicates Game Freak has more independent releases coming in the relatively near future.

Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! is coming to iOS via Apple Arcade.

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