10 Pokémon Games Where the Post-Game Feels Like a Whole New Adventure

2 hours ago 2

Published Apr 27, 2026, 3:07 PM EDT

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

Pokémon games, much like the anime that got all of us into them, aren’t exactly straight lines with beginnings and endings. Yeah, you start your adventure, catch some Pokémon, defeat the evil team, beat the Elite Four, etcetera, but actually becoming a Pokémon Master? Becoming the best there ever was? That takes more than just one adventure. This is why many Pokémon games, both in and out of the mainline titles, have some manner of post-game to really test your mettle.

Carmine, a Mimikyu and a trainer spotting you featured image

Every Mainline Pokemon Generation, Ranked By Story

While the Pokemon games are more known for their characters and mechanics, it doesn't mean there aren't some great stories in there.

The precise nature of the post-game varies from title to title. Sometimes it’s a series of sidequests where you get to know incidental characters, sometimes it’s a new locale where challenging battles and legendaries can be found, and sometimes it’s an entirely new storyline with worldwide implications. Whatever it is, it’s a whole new Poké ballgame, and you won’t be truly done with the game in question until you’ve really exhausted these post-games of their content.

We’re specifically focusing on on-disc post-game content here. DLC doesn’t count.

10 Pokémon X and Y

Welcome to the Looker Bureau

As the first 3D mainline Pokémon game, Pokémon X and Y was able to have a higher concentration of content and story beats in its main towns and cities, especially Lumiose City. By exploring the city, you can find various little side activities to get up to, such as Restaurant Le Wow and the Battle Institute, but the big draw is the Looker Bureau.

After clearing the Kalos League and upgrading your Mega Ring, you’ll get a call from Looker, Lumiose City’s resident detective extraordinaire, who asks you to complete some jobs for him around the city. These start as simple, innocuous little mysteries, but gradually form into a wider conspiracy surrounding the remnants of Team Flare.

This post-game quest was also the first appearance of Emma, an orphaned girl who received the experimental Expansion Suit from Xerosic and became a superhuman Trainer before being unofficially adopted by Looker. If you weren’t familiar with Emma in Pokémon Legends: Z-A, this is where she first appeared and the explanation for why she wears that suit, if not the reason why she’s always Naruto-running in that game.

Legendary Round-Up

Compared to the mainline Pokémon games, Legends: Arceus was a major departure, focusing more on pursuing Pokémon in the wild and catching them in bulk rather than challenging a league. Once the game’s main story is finished, there isn’t exactly a surplus of post-game content, but the content that’s there is interesting due to intersecting with this particular setting and its systems.

The first order of business, as usual, is finding and catching all the legendaries, including the Forces of Nature, the Lake Guardians, Giratina, and even Arceus itself. Some of these legendaries have their own little sidequests and puzzles associated with them, requiring you to put in a little extra legwork beyond simply going to where they spawn. After getting isekai’d to Hisui by Arceus, getting to fight it and put it in a ball has a certain cathartic factor to it.

Additionally, you can talk to Ingo at the Training Grounds and begin freely battling other Pokémon Trainers. Mechanically, this isn’t that noteworthy, but from a story perspective, your exploits around Hisui have sufficiently inspired enough people to stop being afraid of Pokémon and start training them, which is pretty cool thematically.

8 Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky

Learn More About the World

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon explorers of the sky gameplay

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky

As I mentioned at the top, post-games are not exclusive to the mainline Pokémon titles. Several of the franchise’s spin-offs have engaged in their own share of post-gamery, including the beloved Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series. Arguably, the game of that series to have the most interesting post-game content is Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky.

Upon completing the game’s main story, with the final battle against Primal Dialga at Temporal Tower, you receive an extra mission in the Mystifying Forest to graduate from Wigglytuff’s guild. After completing that, you unlock several optional super-dungeons, where you’ll fight many powerful Pokémon, including legendaries like Palkia, Cresselia, and Darkrai.

Additionally, as you progress the main game, you unlock the various special episodes, in which you play as other characters getting up to shenanigans outside your protagonist’s view. Technically, you can play these whenever, but since the last one doesn’t unlock until you graduate, it’d make more sense to just do them all at the end of everything.

7 Pokémon Emerald

Challenge the Battle Frontier

While the first couple of Pokémon generations had opportunities for big post-game battles, it wasn’t until gen 3 that things really started ramping up, and specifically with the release of Pokémon Emerald following Ruby and Sapphire. Emerald would mark the first instance of a post-game locale that would become a mainstay in the series: the Battle Frontier.

After completing the main game, you receive an invitation to the Battle Frontier, a private island composed of seven high-level battle facilities, each one headed up by a unique Frontier Brain. Each of these facilities has its own special rules and procedures; the Battle Tower, for instance, has trainer battles that naturally ramp up in difficulty the higher you go, while the Battle Factory forces you to use rental Pokémon instead of your own.

Of course, we can’t forget about the legendaries. As a third entry to gen 3, Emerald lets you catch both Groudon and Kyogre, as well as one of the coolest legendaries in the series, Rayquaza, not to mention the Regi Trio and the Eon Duo. Those lucky enough to participate in a time-limited event back in the day could also catch Deoxys, though I didn’t personally know anyone who got the chance.

6 Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon

Battle Team Rainbow Rocket

The original versions of Pokémon Sun and Moon had some cool post-game content, such as exploring Ultra Wormholes and challenging veteran Trainers at the Battle Tree. Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon carried those over, but also added a little something extra to the mix: Team Rainbow Rocket, the most powerful evil team in Pokémon history.

When you start the post-game, Team Rainbow Rocket appears and swiftly conquers the Aether Paradise building, transforming it into their personal castle. This iteration of the original evil team, headed by a parallel Giovanni, has members composed of the alternate versions of the franchise’s many evil team leaders, each having successfully bent the world to their whims in their respective timelines before converging via Ultra Wormholes.

10 Things I Wish I Could Do In A Pokémon Game

We all live in a Pokémon world, and I want to see more of it.

Each of these alternate bosses are packing their respective games’ legendaries, not to mention generally high levels, so they’re quite the force to be reckoned with. It’s also just cool to see Giovanni again in particular, especially since, even after you beat him, he doesn’t stop being evil. He just leaves for another dimension where he can start his plan over again. That guy always was committed to being a reprobate.

5 Pokémon Platinum

Get into the Battle Zone

In a similar vein to Emerald, Pokémon Platinum carried over most of the post-game content from Diamond and Pearl while adding a little extra zest in the form of high-level battles. However, unlike Emerald, the Battle Frontier alone wasn’t enough. No sir, Platinum went the extra distance, all the way up to the Battle Zone.

While the Battle Zone technically existed in Diamond and Pearl, in those versions, it only housed the Battle Tower and Battle Park, which were cool, but generally pretty straightforward. The Platinum Battle Zone, on the other hand, replaces both with a revamped version of the Battle Frontier, including five new facilities with new Frontier Brains.

The Battle Zone is also home to Resort and Survival Areas, with the latter also being home to the Platinum-exclusive Battleground, a special arena where you can freely re-challenge both Gym Leaders and Stat Trainers. If you’re interested in Pokémon Contests at all, you can find the Ribbon Syndicate in the Resort Area, which you can only enter by winning at least 10 Contest ribbons.

4 Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire

The Delta Episode

Pokemon Omega Ruby Alpha Sapphire Mega Rayquaza Deoxys

Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire

When Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were announced, the big question on everyone’s mind was “what about Emerald? Are they gonna remake Emerald as well?” Surprisingly, they did not. Rather, we got elements of Emerald mixed into an entirely new storyline for both versions, titled the Delta Episode.

After successfully surmounting the Hoenn League, you can begin the story of the Delta Episode, in which the mysterious Dragon trainer Zinnia seeks out your help in locating the Legendary Pokémon Rayquaza. Why? Well, because there’s a giant meteoroid on a collision course with the planet, and only a Rayquaza with the power to Mega Evolve has a shot at stopping it. No pressure.

The Delta Episode takes you on a surprisingly lengthy jaunt around Hoenn as you follow Zinnia’s lead, battling remnants of Team Magma/Aqua along the way before finally bonding with a Rayquaza and even getting into a space battle with Deoxys. There’s even a part where Zinnia directly references the original Ruby and Sapphire canon, implying that without Mega Evolution, that world would’ve been destroyed by the meteor.

3 Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen

Voyage to the Sevii Islands

Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen

The very first Pokémon games, Red and Blue, didn’t have much in the way of post-game content. You could go and fight Mewtwo and… that was about it. As FireRed and LeafGreen launched during gen 3, when post-game stuff had become more normalized, plus a lot of extra Pokémon added, there needed to be a way to accommodate both of those needs while preserving the original games’ vibes.

While the overall progressions of FireRed and LeafGreen’s main campaigns are largely the same as the originals, after defeating the Elite Four and Blue, you unlock an entirely new area to explore: the Sevii Islands. These islands serve as a sort of link point between gen 1-era Kanto and the greater gen 3 world. Technically, you can go there as soon as you have the Volcano Badge, but you can’t explore freely without the National Dex.

The islands are home to Pokémon from gen 2, including some that couldn’t be found in the gen 3 games, which helped to diversify the trading scene back in the day. There’s also an extra sub-story surrounding a Team Rocket cell that hadn’t got the memo that the group had already disbanded.

2 Pokémon Black 2 and White 2

We All Live in a Pokémon World Tournament

Pokemon Black 2 White 2 World Tournament

By gen 5, Pokémon as a franchise had amassed quite the healthy stable of noteworthy Trainers, from the many Gym Leaders and Elite Four members to your various rivals and counterparts. The first game that would let you challenge all of these incredible Trainers back-to-back was Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, via the Pokémon World Tournament.

Black 2 and White 2’s post-game offers a surprising surplus of cool stuff to get into, such as the Battle Subway, Battle Institute, and various legendaries, but the Pokémon World Tournament is definitely the highlight. At this peak-performance tourney, just about every noteworthy Trainer from every previous generation is assembled for single-elimination battles in all battle formats.

There are separate tournaments for each region, as well as mix-pack tournaments featuring various Gym Leaders and a marathon of all the Champions, plus specialized tournaments focusing on specific Pokémon types. All levels are equalized for these tournaments, so it’s a contest of pure skill, the true peak of Pokémon Trainer expertise.

1 Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver

Two Regions for the Price of One

The original release of Pokémon Gold and Silver on the Game Boy was monumental in that it introduced the Johto region, making us all realize that the world of Pokémon was even bigger than we thought. Getting to voyage through an entire new region and see new towns and Gyms was pretty cool, but as it turned out, that was only half the equation, which becomes even clearer in the updated releases, HeartGold and SoulSilver.

After clearing all the Gyms in the Johto League, you then get to voyage back to Kanto to take on the Indigo League, challenging all the first game’s Gyms, some of which with new leaders, as well as the Elite Four and Champion. It’s both a cool way to see how Kanto changed between gens 1 and 2, and a nifty way to challenge yourself.

Even after all that, there’s a post-post-game, wherein you can hunt for the legendaries, re-challenge Gym Leaders and the Elite Four, take on the Battle Frontier, and most importantly, climb Mt. Silver. There, you’ll get a chance to challenge the original Pokémon protagonist, Red, and experience his awesome battle BGM.