That’s where Pokémon XP comes in: the first dedicated fan convention, which debuted right alongside 2026’s Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco.
Following all the excitement at 2025’s Pokémon Worlds in Anaheim, Radio Times Gaming was invited out to San Francisco to find out exactly what a fan event simultaneously held in tandem with the usual World Championships looks like.
It turns out, Pokémon XP is pretty great – especially thanks to all we got to learn about the upcoming series, Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu.
What is the Pokémon XP event?
Even bigger attractions, fashion shows, more mascots, pinball machines, Pokémon gaming side events, musical performances, a plethora of special guests, a lavish garden area and more full-on experiences you can take part in, and exclusive panels covering the latest big happenings in any part of the Pokémon fandom.
The reason for this was driven home by Chris Brown, director of global esports and events at The Pokémon Company International – who was asked in a roundtable interview we attended, during the middle of the first XP, about the advantages of splitting the weekend into two separate shows.
“You know, you hear the World Championships coming, you might sort of hear, ‘okay, that's a competitive thing, it's not for me’. We wanted there to be something out there that made it more clear that, in fact, this is for just a fan.
“And that's great to see, and that's going very well.”
How does Pokémon XP compare to activities at last year’s Worlds?
Within the confines of San Francisco’s very large Moscone Convention Center, though, the hundreds of staff working within or with The Pokémon Company made plenty of the entire space dedicated to something fun to do or see.
What was arguably among the most jaw-dropping was walking through the Pokémon-Golden Gate Bridge-style entrance, taking you to the specially designed Rayquaza Road – crafted with attractions to enjoy from the get-go while connecting you to all the other activities inside for both the XP and World Championships.
What’s more, despite only being for 20 minutes each day, Rayquaza Road was also the base for the daily Pikachu & Friends parade — which was so adorably wholesome, I hope this makes it into all Pokémon events going forward in at least some form.
The very best part of Pokémon XP
These will of course differ from year to year going forward, but as far as first impressions go, having special panels that fans can attend is a brilliant opportunity to show off whatever amazing creative projects are coming out of a massive multimedia franchise like Pokémon.
Joined by Phil Rynda, the Pokémon Company’s director of original animation, were Aardman’s director of the show Tom Parkinson, creative director Natalie McKay, and model making creative Lead James Young.
Not only did they give us an early look at the trailer below, but also some of the finer details on how they brought their distinct expertise in claymation-style, stop-motion animation to the Pokémon world – starring the titular Sirfetch’d and Pichu adventuring around the Galar region as knight and squire, meeting and having humorous encounters with various other Pokémon along the way.
View oEmbed on the source websiteObjectively, sure, not everything that gets a panel in the future might be groundbreaking, but when it’s through artists like those at Aardman, we immediately got the sense that this has been the birth of a very special collaboration with TCPi.
After all, when the biggest media IP on Earth like Pokémon starts working with a very uniquely styled company like Aardman, it’s easy to feel at least initially concerned that the final product might have lost some of the latter’s shine that makes it so special in translation.
Jordan Middler of Video Games Chronicle, pointing out the hilarious picture of Pichu with the iconic Aardman-style teeth, asked for more on how much freedom the animation studio was given by Pokémon to make it its own.
“Looking at animation, looking at frames, looking at really character-specific things that might only show up in one game, in a cycle in a video game, that shows up in every frame of the show. Almost every frame.
Honing in on the fine line of such a collaboration, we asked ourselves if any material made the cutting room floor, in the event it suited neither team.
“And we all laugh but then go ‘maybe that goes a little too far’ and just pull it out, but that's normal for most shows. I think we're really happy with the way that we're getting ideas over the line, and you guys seem very happy [addressing Rynda] with the way we're approaching things, but yeah, those moments do come up.”
Parkinson also mentioned how the collaborative process has appropriately evolved over time, saying: “It's fun challenging the preconceptions. In the early days, we used to go, 'I don't know if they'll like this. I don't know if this will fly.'
McKay poignantly noted: ”It's a collaboration, isn't it?
“So, that back and forth has really helped make this show feel very specific to both Pokémon & Aardman.”
Even more interactive fun at Pokémon XP
Granted, we had just over an hour to try to replicate a puppet that an Aardman professional spent many more perfecting, but it was one of the funniest arts & crafts-style projects you can take part in when you’re in a group.
Plus, I got to use Charizard, so that was already a win for me.
One major area for improvement
Even back when we asked Chris Brown in his aforementioned roundtable if Pokémon XP could end up being its own thing (instead of being held in tandem with Worlds), he made it clear that the plan was to ‘see how this year goes’. That’s especially since the idea of doing a separate event instead of a combined one, as Brown put it, “doubles the logistical challenge”.
The biggest was with XP’s Pin Rally – where fans could venture around Worlds/XP to collect 12 distinct pins scattered across the Moscone venue. However, SFGate reported that, versus the roughly 50,000 attendees, there were only around 8,000 pins to hand out each day.
View Green Video on the source websiteThe other was that some of those same kind of long lines were abundant at some of Pokémon XP’s other attractions as well – most notably the preview of the TCG’s 30th Celebration set preview and the anticipated Pokémon Museum – where the latter’s queue had a roughly two-hour wait at the longest.
Pokémon has already taken the feedback on
Be that as it may, Chris Brown was already aware of these problems after experiencing the first couple of days of the event. Back in his roundtable, the Pokémon Worlds/XP boss noted:
“There's some stuff we're going to try to fix in the moment, you know, make some rearrangement, move things around. There's other things that it's like ‘we just didn't get it right’. And we're going to have to figure out, you know, ‘how do we fix that in the future?’”
He added: “I think for this year, pin trading has been both very successful but also has created massive queues. You know, we made 300,000 pins across the 12 pin stations. So there's enough for everybody to get several pins.
View Riddle on the source website“And so, I think for us, we're going to take back and look at the pin trading and like, ‘OK, what's that next evolution for [Pin Rally]?’ Because obviously those big queues do create some problems.
“So that one we're definitely going to take back and think about the future and how we want to evolve the experience.”
Was the first Pokémon XP good?
For a first-time fan convention with massively scaled-up logistics fitting in with a long-running world championships series, Pokémon XP was still an absolutely fantastic companion event any lover of Pokémon could enjoy.
If Pokémon XP does indeed end up taking a year off, skipping Singapore’s Worlds in 2027 to reassess and improve for an eventual return, the next Pokémon XP may be the best event the franchise has ever seen.
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