Earlier today, the Pokemon Company released a brand new trailer for Pokemon Sword & Shield revealing two new gym leaders that players will face off against in the games.

As you may have read in our recap post, the two new gym leaders are the Fighting-Type specialist Bea and the Ghost-Type master Allister. However, one important detail not mentioned in the trailer was that these two gym leaders are version exclusive. Players who choose Sword will battle Bea, while Players who choose Shield will encounter Allister. Currently, it is not known if Bea will still appear in Shield version in a different capacity, or if Allister will appear in Sword.

Version Exclusives

This is of course not the first time the Pokemon franchise has seen Version Exclusive Gym Leaders. A similar situation occurred in Pokemon Black & White, where in Pokemon Black the final gym leader was Drayden, while in Pokemon White the final gym leader was Iris. However, while in that case both Drayden and Iris specialized in the same type (Dragon), Bea and Allister specialize in different types.

In addition, the official website updated with new details on version exclusive Pokemon. It confirmed that Deino and Jangmo-o would be exclusive to Pokemon Sword, while Larvitar and Goomy will be exclusive to Pokemon Shield. For those of you still wondering which version to get, this would likely be an important detail to note down.

Pokemon Sword & Shield are scheduled to launch on 15 November for Nintendo Switch.