Is Pokémon Winds & Waves Secretly Chasing Tears of the Kingdom’s Three-World Magic?

The Trailer Moment That Made Me Think “Wait… Is This Zelda?”

The exact second Pokémon: Winds and Waves hooked me wasn’t the starters reveal (though I’m absolutely riding with Gecqua, that little gremlin has main-character energy). It wasn’t even the gorgeous tropical archipelago, or the confirmation that this is our big Gen 10 opinion: Winds Waves game moment on Nintendo’s next hardware.

It was that underwater shot.

You know the one. The trainer drops beneath the surface on that scooter-like contraption, Rotom wired into it like some cursed GoPro, and suddenly we’re in this luminous, open ocean. Not a tiny “Route 129 but blue-er” corridor. An actual space, with depth, visibility, and the kind of camera work that screams, “You’re going to spend serious time down here.”

Then the camera cuts back up, and we see the clouds. One in particular lingers just a little too lovingly. Not a random skybox nothing-cloud, but a “Hey, remember Tears of the Kingdom?” cloud. And that’s when my brain did the horrible, wonderful thing it always does: it started connecting dots, overhyping itself, and building an entire game system out of a two-minute teaser.

My theory is simple and borderline irresponsible: Pokémon: Winds and Waves is going to steal The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s three-realm exploration – surface, sky, and underworld – and translate it into a Pokémon context where moves aren’t just battle commands, but full-blown traversal mechanics across sea, land, and sky.

And honestly? It’s about damn time.

My Big Theory: Pokémon Is About to Go Full “Three Worlds”

Tears of the Kingdom did something that’s now burned into my design brain: it turned Hyrule into three intertwined layers – ground, sky islands, and the Depths. You’re not just travelling horizontally; you’re constantly recontextualising the map vertically. That’s why people sank hundreds of hours into it without seeing everything. It wasn’t just more land — it was more dimensions.

When I look at the Winds and Waves trailer, I see Game Freak sketching their own version of that idea. A cluster of islands as the “surface.” A big, explorable ocean as the “Depths.” And that weird, suspicious cloud teasing a “sky” layer. Not necessarily a 1:1 copy, but the same philosophy: three realms, one world.

Here’s the key though: Zelda used abilities like Ascend, Ultrahand and Recall to glue those realms together. Pokémon already has the perfect equivalent baked into its DNA — moves and abilities. The franchise has been sitting on a goldmine of traversal verbs for decades and has mostly used them as glorified keys and menu options. Cut this tree. Surf here. Press A to Fly. Yawn.

Winds and Waves has a rare chance to fix that. Take all those classic HMs and TMs, all those niche utility moves, and make them the way you actually interact with the world — not just the way you clear a bush blocking a route. If this game really wants to embrace open-world ambition on Switch 2, this is the angle that actually excites me: Pokémon moves as full-scale traversal mechanics across three distinct realms.

The Ocean Isn’t a Route This Time, It’s a Realm

Let’s start with the obvious one: the waves half of Winds and Waves. That underwater scene is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It isn’t shot like a tiny diving mini-game. The scale, the lighting, the distance fog — it all screams “this is an actual layer of the world”. Not a gimmick. A zone.

I grew up forcing my way through the water routes in Ruby and Sapphire, drowning in Tentacool encounters and abstract blue tiles. The idea of a genuine, continuous underwater realm where you’re free to roam, actually look around, and use your team creatively? That hits a specific part of my nostalgia and screams, “Finally, you cowards.”

Imagine this: Dive isn’t just a cutscene or a transition. It’s a real action. You’re in the overworld, riding your water mount across choppy seas, and you hit a whirlpool. Instead of that being a wall, you pop Dive and spiral down into a submerged trench — no loading screen, no fade to black, just camera tilt and your ears popping metaphorically.

Down there, other moves take over as traversal tools. Whirlpool to clear swirling current tunnels. Flash or a new bioluminescent move to light up darker abysses. Maybe Magnet Rise lets you hover above lethal sea urchin fields on a thin layer of water like some anime surfer. You’re not just “underwater now”; you’re in the “Depths” equivalent, with its own rules, ecosystems, and high-level threats.

Give me underwater ruins where you actually solve movement puzzles. Strong currents you halt with a well-placed Muddy Water or re-route with Surf. Coral “doors” that only open when you ping them with the right sound-based move. Boss-tier Pokémon sitting at the bottom of pressure-heavy trenches only reachable if you stack defensive buffs or bring the right ability combo.

In other words: don’t just reskin caves as water. Make the ocean Pokémon’s equivalent to Zelda’s Depths — alien, dangerous, and genuinely worth exploring for its own sake.

Land Needs to Be More Than a Lobby Between Biomes

The “surface layer” in Tears of the Kingdom works because it’s the anchor. Sky and Depths are wild, but the ground is where your brain keeps its map. Winds and Waves’ island clusters can be that, but only if Game Freak stops treating land as a series of open but empty fields.

Scarlet and Violet already tried the open-world thing and gave us some brilliant moments… buried in an awful lot of nothing. Big stretches of terrain that felt like tech demos instead of designed spaces. Traversal was cool thanks to Koraidon and Miraidon, but most of the time you were just sprinting in a straight line to the next point of interest.

Winds and Waves has a cleaner premise: scattered islands, environmental forces like wind and waves blocking paths, and vertically interesting terrain that actually begs for specialty movement tools. This is where Pokémon moves can step up as problem-solvers instead of pure keys.

Rock Smash could crack brittle cliff faces to reveal shortcuts or hidden dens. Strength could let certain Pokémon literally push platforms to create makeshift bridges over ravines. Grass Knot could tether swinging vines over gaps. Dig could become a way to bypass surface storms by tunnelling under them into caves that pop you out on the far side of the island.

And crucially: don’t gate all of this behind some single “super mount” like the bike-legendaries. Let me build a squad specifically for traversal. If my land team is basically a toolbox — one for pushing, one for climbing, one for tunnelling — suddenly party composition matters outside of battle again. That’s interesting. That’s strategy. That’s the kind of thing an opinion: Winds Waves piece like this exists to beg for.

The Sky Is Where Winds and Waves Either Soars or Chickens Out

The “Winds” half of the title is doing suspiciously heavy lifting. You don’t slap winds in the name and then keep the sky as pure decoration. At least, you don’t if you’re serious about competing with Tears of the Kingdom’s sky islands in gamers’ heads.

I’m convinced that cloud we keep seeing in the trailer isn’t just mood lighting. It lingers. It has shape. It’s framed like a destination. If the ocean is the Depths and the islands are the surface, then that cloud – and whatever is hidden above the clouds – is the sky realm equivalent. Floaty islands, airborne ruins, maybe even version-exclusive weather patterns messing with how you ascend.

This is where Fly needs to stop being a menu option and become an actual traversal state. Picture this: you stand on a cliff edge during a high-wind event, pop Fly on your flying-type partner, and instead of a fast-travel map, you physically launch into the skies, gliding and banking across air currents like a feathery paraglider upgrade.

Maybe you chain moves: Tailwind for a speed burst, then Roost to safely land on a narrow platform. Maybe Bounce or Sky Drop becomes a way to hop between floating chunks of land. Imagine updrafts created by Fire-type moves that let you ride thermal columns higher, or Electric Terrain platforms that temporarily solidify charged storm clouds so you can run across them.

If Winds and Waves wants to feel genuinely next-gen Pokémon, this is the ceiling it needs to break. Let me have full, real-time transitions from surface to sky and back, powered by my team’s moves, not just some legendary mount doing all the heavy lifting in canned animations.

Turning Moves Into Traversal Tools (Kill the Old HM Mindset)

Here’s the core shift I’m hoping for: stop treating moves like glorified keys in a checklist and start treating them like systemic tools in a physics-lite sandbox, just like Link’s runes in Tears of the Kingdom.

We’ve had shades of this before. Legends: Arceus experimented with multiple mounts specialising in different movement types. Scarlet and Violet rolled everything into Koraidon and Miraidon. But in both cases, it was the mount that mattered, not the actual moves. Your team — the supposed heart of the series — was largely just along for the ride while one special creature did all the work.

Winds and Waves has a chance to flip that. Make it so that any Pokémon with the right move can contribute to traversal. Give us optional side routes, shortcuts, and secret puzzles that demand specific move types — not just an arbitrary story gate. Suddenly, that weird support mon with Magnet Rise and Trick Room is borderline essential for reaching a certain hidden sky island at dusk, when the winds are just right. That’s the kind of emergent value this series desperately needs.

Some random examples that should already exist but don’t:

• Psychic or Confusion-type moves to telekinetically pull distant platforms or chests closer.
• Ice Beam to freeze thin waterfalls into scalable ice ladders in the mountains.
• Sunny Day to clear fog banks, revealing mirage islands or hidden sandbars.
• Sandstorm to temporarily reshape dunes, exposing buried ruins or creating new paths.
• Gravity to slam low-flying enemies or balloons to the ground so you can actually reach them.

None of this is beyond what Game Freak can pull off technically, especially on new hardware. The question is whether they’re finally willing to let Pokémon moves matter in the overworld as much as they do in battle. That’s the line between “nice trailer, same old game” and “oh, they really went for it this time.”

Puzzles, Legendaries, and Why Exploration Needs Real Teeth

If you’re going to build three realms — sea, land, sky — then they need to feel mechanically distinct, not just visually different. This is where Tears of the Kingdom absolutely clowned on most open worlds: its puzzles were baked into the terrain itself. Momentum, rotation, gravity, recall — they all touched exploration, combat, and problem-solving.

Pokémon has flirted with this through environmental gyms and the occasional strength-boulder puzzle, but it’s always been kindergarten-level stuff. The player base is older now. We can handle actual logic puzzles. Let the three realms each develop their own style of problem-solving.

Maybe the ocean realm leans into navigation and pressure management: finding air pockets, redirecting currents, timing Dive and Surf combos to slip through dangerous reefs. The land realm could be about environmental manipulation: moving objects, growing or burning obstacles, dealing with weather systems. The sky realm could emphasise timing, momentum, and control in thin air, chaining Fly, Tailwind, and other move-effects just to stay aloft long enough to reach a far-off island.

Now tie Legendaries into that. Don’t just stick them in themed caves. Put the wind Legendary in a storm system that drifts across the map and can only be reached when multiple moves sync with the environment — boosting winds, calming lightning, stabilising platforms. Put the sea Legendary in a crushing trench where only specific defensive and light-based moves let you survive the descent. Maybe a third Legendary sits at the convergence of all three realms, requiring you to master movement in each layer just to get an attempt.

Make exploration something you prepare for the way you prep for the Elite Four. I want to look at my boxes and think, “Okay, this is my ‘Deep Dive’ squad. This team is my ‘Sky Route’ specialists.” That’s how you make traversing the world feel like part of the core game, not just the mandatory glue between battles.

Why Tears of the Kingdom Is the Blueprint Pokémon Actually Needs

People get weirdly defensive whenever you compare Pokémon to Zelda, like they exist in totally different universes. They don’t. They’re both Nintendo titans with open-world ambitions, overlapping player bases, and decades of baggage. Tears of the Kingdom didn’t just add more map; it rethought how players interact with that map. Winds and Waves needs that same attitude shift.

I don’t need Pokémon to copy Ultrahand and let me build cursed flying machines made of Bidoof corpses and fans. But I do want that same feeling that every system is talking to every other system. Abilities, traversal, geography, puzzles, Legendaries — all of it in conversation, not siloed into “battle stuff” vs. “overworld stuff.”

Right now, the trailer hints suggest that Game Freak at least understands the power of multiple realms: underwater zones, island biomes, suspicious sky focus. The question is whether they follow through the way Nintendo did with TOTK, or whether the sea is just “water routes but deeper” and the sky is a glorified cutscene location.

I’m choosing to be optimistic for once. The five-year gap leading to that 2027 release, the move to new hardware, the bolder framing of the region — it all lines up with a team that knows their next opinion: Winds Waves game can’t just be “Scarlet and Violet but wetter.” They have to aim higher. Literally.

If Game Freak Pulls This Off, I’ll Shut Up About Scarlet/Violet… Mostly

I’ve been playing Pokémon since the Game Boy days, and I’ve put more hours than I’d like to admit into Gen 9, frame drops and all. So when I say I’m desperate for Winds and Waves to go big on this three-realm, move-as-traversal idea, it’s not just idle wishlisting. It’s self-preservation. I want to stay emotionally invested in this series, not just habitually attached.

If Gen 10 delivers an interconnected sea, land, and sky where my team’s moves actually matter beyond battle, where exploration feels like a real pillar of the design instead of a corridor between story beats, I’ll happily eat crow about my skepticism. I’ll replay those underwater dives and cloud ascents the way I replayed my first skydive from a sky island into Hyrule Field.

But if that underwater shot and that lingering cloud turn out to be nothing more than cinematic bait for another mostly-flat world with glorified fast travel? Then yeah, I’m calling it: that will be the moment I stop giving Pokémon the benefit of the doubt and start treating it as a series that chose comfort over possibility.

For now, though, I’m choosing hope. I’m looking at that cloud and that ocean and seeing the outline of something genuinely bold: a Pokémon world that finally understands what Tears of the Kingdom proved — that the magic isn’t just in having a big map. It’s in giving us the tools to truly own it.

And if that means my poor future Switch 2 spends 300 hours rendering me spamming Dive, Fly, and a ridiculous chain of utility moves just to reach some absurd sky island with a smug Legendary on it? Good. That’s the kind of grind I’ll gladly sign up for.