Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Players Warned After Switch 2 Transfer Goes Horribly Wrong

For more than two decades now, the Pokemon franchise has allowed players to import the Pokemon they’ve trained into later games. For many of us, that means being able to use the same Pokemon in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet that we’ve been training all the way back to entries released on the Game Boy Advance. That can be decades of data, and the prospect of losing it all is a horrifying one. Unfortunately, that seems to be what happened to one user on Reddit after transferring their save data from their existing Switch OLED to a Nintendo Switch 2.

While the transfer seemed to go just fine for everything else, Reddit user ThatOtaku26 was crushed to discover that their data for Pokemon Scarlet was wiped from both the Switch OLED and the Nintendo Switch 2. Since they had several Pokemon from previous games in that save file, they ended up losing “20 years worth of data.” At this time, it’s unclear if the user will be able to somehow recover the save data, since the Pokemon games do not allow saving to the cloud. Several Reddit users have shared suggestions, including reaching out to Nintendo to see if there’s some way that the data might be recovered.

Nintendo Switch 2 has been out for almost two weeks, as of this writing. If this problem were a common one, we’d probably hear more reports about people losing access to Pokemon Scarlet and Violet data. Right now, it looks like this may have happened in some isolated cases, and isn’t a common issue. It’s impossible to say how this happened, but one Reddit user speculated that the original poster might have unknowingly received a hacked Pokemon from a trade, and the data was erased when they attempted a transfer.

It’s worth noting that I reviewed Nintendo’s new system earlier this month, and ran into no issues with my own Pokemon Scarlet save file. However, fans are now warning others that they should consider transferring any important Pokemon over to Pokemon Home before initiating the Nintendo Switch 2 transfer process. Since that information is saved on The Pokemon Company’s own servers, players won’t have to worry about losing any Pokemon transferred ahead of time. Then, if there does happen to be an issue, players will still retain their beloved Pokemon, even if the game data itself is gone.

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It remains to be seen whether Nintendo or The Pokemon Company will be able to do anything about this, but the original poster’s story is dragging up a lot of emotions from Pokemon fans that have lost their own save data over the years. Nearly every Pokemon fan has a similar story of losing their data at some point, whether it was a copy of Pokemon Red that lost save data without warning, or a friend that accidentally saved over an existing file. If you want to be on the safe side when transferring your precious save data when getting a Switch 2, take the extra steps to move your Pokemon into Pokemon Home, just to be on the safe side.

Have you transferred your save data to Nintendo Switch 2? Did you run into any issues with the transfer? Share your thoughts with me directly on Bluesky at @Marcdachamp, or on Instagram at @Dachampgaming!

[H/T: Nintendo Everything]