It all makes sense now.

One cool little feature found within Pokémon Sword and Shield is the way in which trainers have their very own jersey number, with players, rivals, and Gym Leaders all having their own numeric identities. It would be easy to assume that each character’s number has been plucked out at random as there’s no obvious link between them (to our western eyes, at least), but a common theme across all Leaders has been discovered.

That theme has been shared online by Twitter user @aevanko (thanks, GameXplain), who explains that the numbers are all wordplay jokes in Japanese. We did a little more digging on the topic and came across Goroawase, a common wordplay system in which Japanese speakers associate numbers with a series of letters. The system is apparently used in phone numbers amongst other things, where a dentist might feature a string of numbers which equates to “no cavities”, for example.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com