Today, the entire first season of Pokémon: Indigo League landed on Disney+. Ash's original 1997 journey out of Pallet Town, all in one place for the first time on the platform. It's a nice moment on its own, but it's really just the latest entry in a list that's been growing since February. Pokémon's 30th anniversary hasn't been one big celebration so much as a rolling drip that's touched nearly every part of the franchise, and it's worth stepping back to see how much of it has actually landed.

The year kicked off during Super Bowl LX on February 8, when a commercial featuring Jigglypuff and the new 30th anniversary logo aired to one of the biggest audiences in television. Three weeks later, on February 27, Pokémon Day made the anniversary official and doubled as the announcement stage for the next mainline generation. Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves introduced Generation X, Switch 2 exclusives due out in 2027, with three new starters (a grass-type bird named Browt, a fire-type dog named Pombon, and a water-type gecko named Gecqua) and an open world built around windswept islands and underwater exploration, a mechanic the series hasn't leaned on in years.

Two games have already shipped into that anniversary window. Pokémon Champions launched as the series' live-service ranked battler, and Pokémon Pokopia arrived as a stranger, quieter release: a post-apocalyptic take on Kanto where humans evacuated the planet and Pokémon kept the region running without them. Pokopia's Bubbly Basin DLC dropped this month and, almost as a side note, confirmed the game shares its universe with Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! - complete with a Trace and Marowak cameo and a version of Misty dressed in her Let's Go outfit.

The trading card side has been the biggest flashpoint. The Pokémon TCG: 30th Celebration expansion releases worldwide on September 16, the franchise's first-ever simultaneous global TCG launch, and every card in the set is foil, down to the basic energy. It introduces two new rarities, Futuristic rare and Pikachu rare, with 30 different Pikachu cards spread across the set. That should have been the clean anniversary story. Instead, GameStop and its EB Games subsidiary spent a week marking 30th Celebration products up as high as 340% over MSRP before backlash forced a rollback, which turned the set's launch into a case study in how not to handle anniversary hype.

The competitive and event calendar has stayed busy too. The Pokémon World Championships land in San Francisco August 28 through 30, with Regulation M-B extended by a week to smooth the format heading in and Twitch Drops running for anyone watching the broadcast. Add in the NHKSO x Pokémon Classic Concert Tour, which has its own anniversary merchandise including a Pikachu plush dressed as a conductor, and the celebration has stretched well past games and cards into music and live events.

None of this reads like a single anniversary moment so much as a year-long checklist that keeps getting new items added to it. Nine months in, Pokémon has run a Super Bowl ad, announced a new generation, shipped two games, launched (and briefly mishandled) its biggest TCG set yet, and started re-releasing its original show on a major streaming platform. With Worlds still three weeks out and Winds and Waves still more than a year away, the 30th anniversary isn't close to done. It's just getting to the part with the biggest crowds.