Game Freak’s Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive got skipped at Pokémon Worlds. Every other major Pokémon game got some kind of update. Winds and Waves got nothing.
So fans went looking elsewhere. And a 4chan leak, now circulating through prominent Pokémon leakers like Centro, has handed them something to argue about.
What the screenshot actually shows
It’s a shot of what looks like the inventory user interface for Winds and Waves. Nothing shocking about the layout itself. It’s roughly what you’d expect from a Pokémon menu, and it’ll almost certainly get cleaned up before release, since the background is still running unfinished texture models.
The menu isn’t the story. The Pokémon listed inside it are.
Half of them are sitting behind generic placeholder art. Two of them are using placeholder art of Moltres, the fiery legendary bird from Pokémon Red and Blue.
The Moltres pick isn’t random
The text in that section reads “Gokurakucho,” which roughly translates to bird of paradise. And there are two separate entries: “Gokurakucho 1” and “Gokurakucho 2.”
That points in one of two directions. Either Gokurakucho evolves, or Winds and Waves is packing multiple birds of paradise.
Which would be an embarrassment of riches, design-wise. There are an enormous number of birds of paradise out there and nearly all of them already look like Pokémon. That’s not a compliment to Game Freak so much as a fact about the birds.
One real bird fits suspiciously well
Narrow the field to Indonesian birds of paradise, since that’s the region Winds and Waves reportedly mimics, and the Red Bird of Paradise stands out. Paradisaea rubra, if you want the Latin.
Its color scheme lines up with Moltres. It’s also close to Legendary-rare in real life, living on only a few small islands.
It isn’t quite headed for extinction, but the population is dropping. The official classification sits at “Near Threatened.”
All of this is speculation. The Moltres icons could be placeholder art with zero connection to whatever the monster turns out to be. Placeholder art is, by definition, a thing that gets replaced.
There’s a second leak, and it’s about the starters
The Moltres business is only one of two Winds and Waves monster leaks in circulation. The other is an image claiming to be a “riddle” for the final stage evolutions of starters Browt, Pombon and Gecqua.
Same leaker who posted the UI photo, for whatever that’s worth to you.
Nobody’s confirming these until the game ships. Game Freak doesn’t share final stage evolutions before launch, so the riddles stay unfalsifiable for a while yet.
Read them however you like. My take: Gecqua’s final form lands as some kind of magical creature, possibly psychic, and Browt becomes this generation’s fighting-type.
Which means the cursed fire/fighting starter streak might finally be dead. Rest in pieces.
What’s confirmed, and what isn’t
Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves arrive on Nintendo Switch 2 in 2027. The RPG keeps turn-based battles, though they’ll reportedly play out differently than you’re used to.
Everything else is a JPEG of a menu with two orange birds in it, and a drought long enough that people are studying it like scripture.
