🌦️ After finishing Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, Game Freak's Shigeru Ohmori started two new games at the same time. One became Pokémon Pokopia, which launched worldwide in 9 languages and passed 2.2 million copies sold in its first four days. The other is a free-to-play phone game about magical girls, real weather forecasts and doing the laundry. For now, it is slated for Japan only, in Japanese only.

In a long interview with the Japanese games site Denfaminicogamer, published October 12, 2026, Ohmori explained how the second game came about.

Two games from one desk

The game is called Ame nochi Hare Onna. "Ame nochi hare" is forecast wording for "rain, then clearing," the "nochi" marking a change partway through the period. A "hare onna" is a "sunshine woman," someone who seems to bring fine weather whenever she goes out.

Game Freak announced it on September 14, 2026, for iOS and Android. It is free-to-play with in-app purchases, and as of October 2026 it is scheduled for winter 2026. It is co-developed with Chronogate, a Yokohama studio run by Katsunori Suginaka, a former Game Freak staffer who serves as the game's scenario director. The official spec sheet lists the release region as Japan and the language as Japanese.

Ohmori is the game's director and producer. At Game Freak he is head of development, and he has directed mainline Pokémon games starting with Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, including Sword and Shield and Scarlet and Violet. On Pokopia, a Nintendo Switch 2 game released March 5, 2026, he was concept and senior director.

Denfaminicogamer's headline calls it a "bishojo game," a Japanese label for games built around a cast of anime-style girls. Many games in that genre are adult titles, so outside Japan the term often suggests one. This is not that. Ohmori, asked directly whether he likes bishojo characters, laughed and said yes, and he drew some of the art himself. He also said he decided from the start that the game would be upbeat, with nothing dark in it.

It started with a wardrobe

The first spark was light, by Ohmori's own account: a magical girl who owns a lot of outfits. Then he asked the boring question. Why would anyone need that many clothes? What would make a player want to change them?

His answer was weather. You wear one thing in the rain and another in the sun. If a game could read real forecast data, the characters would change clothes on their own, and a game about collecting outfits would suddenly have a reason to exist.

The earliest prototype played more like Princess Maker, Gainax's raising simulation where you bring up a daughter, and weather was only a side feature. Ohmori recalls spending about six months before the formal proposal, and possibly a year on the characters, working loosely with character designer Aki Minamino in a group of two or three. Inside the company, he said with a laugh, almost no one was on board.

What finally pulled it together was a household routine. Every morning before doing the laundry, his wife asks him what the weather will be. He checks the afternoon, not just the morning, and the pollen count, and only then can they decide whether to hang the washing outside or indoors. That small daily judgment felt like a game. When he named the heroines "Hare Onna," he said, the scattered ideas snapped into one.

What you actually do

Open the app and the stage select looks like the national weather map on Japanese TV. Weathernews supplies regional data, and the game shows the day's weather plus a week ahead. If it is raining in Hokkaido, you send a rain girl to Hokkaido. You don't go anywhere yourself.

In the story, trash left in town becomes tainted and turns into monsters called Yamikumo. Ohmori took the idea from tsukumogami, the Japanese folk belief that neglected objects can come alive. Your heroines patrol and clean up, and fights are magic card battles built from weather-forecast symbols.

Outfits get dirty in battle, so you wash them and wait for them to dry. According to Automaton, clothes dry faster on sunny days than on rainy ones. Every outfit even carries a care label. Ohmori admits he never understood those symbols himself and figured a game might teach them.

There are more than 3,000 side events, made with the travel company JTB, introducing local food and culture across Japan. The play pattern Ohmori has in mind is twice a day: once in the morning, once at night, at exactly the moments you would normally open a weather app.

"Don't think up Pokémon from Pokémon"

Ohmori points to the Famicom. Nintendo didn't build a screen; it used the TV every home already had. Today the equivalent is the smartphone. And while TV no longer gives everyone the same hits, he says, everyone still sees the forecast without going looking for it.

He ties this to Game Freak's own origin. Pokémon Red and Green grew out of founder Satoshi Tajiri's childhood bug catching. If the people who make Pokémon only draw ideas from Pokémon, Ohmori argues, the range of the games shrinks. In his words, "you must not think up Pokémon from Pokémon."

He is also frank about how hard that advice has become. Telling young developers not to make games from games is harsh, he says, when kids no longer catch bugs unless they set out to. So he picked chores nobody can skip: laundry and cleaning.

Part of the point was a message to his own staff. Many young hires, he says, see Game Freak as the company that makes Pokémon. He wanted to show them that even the head of development is allowed to make something this odd. Game Freak runs an internal program for new titles called Gear Project, and he cites the action RPG Beast of Reincarnation as another product of the same thinking. (We covered that game's launch here.)

Despite the early skepticism, Ohmori says, internal approval came with surprisingly little resistance.

Why "sunny" isn't enough

While building the concept, he dug into the word "hare." In Japanese tradition, hare is the special, festive state, set against "ke," the everyday. A haregi is your best outfit for big occasions. In its sacred sense, hare is also opposed to "kegare," impurity. Ohmori goes further with his own reading: he connects hare to words for spring and for sweeping or purifying, and reads kegare as "ki-gare," withered energy, which shows up as dirt. Washing it away restores hare.

That is the whole game loop. Clean the town, get dirty, wash, return to hare. In Ohmori's telling, it is an old Japanese idea dressed up as chores, which is why Japanese players should grasp it without a tutorial.

Then he laughed about translation. In English, he said, hare just becomes "sunny." Sun, end of story. The pun that ties weather, clothing and purification together disappears.

The weather data and the side events are both built around Japanese regions, and no English version has been announced. Game Freak has not said whether one will follow.

Ohmori sees a precedent. Pokémon Red and Green came out on Game Boy on February 27, 1996. As he recalls it, the industry was chasing 3D on PlayStation, Game Freak shipped a black-and-white game, and it was not planned as a global release at the time. Game Freak, he says, tends to make something fun in Japan first and figure out how to spread it later. Meanwhile, its sibling Pokopia went worldwide on day one.

On Hatena Bookmark, one Japanese user wondered how the game will play in San'in, which they described as cloudy all winter. Another liked the character designs but sighed that it was a mobile live-service game.

Is there a word in your language that, like hare, would lose half its meaning the moment you translate it?

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