Pokemon Bank Now Available In West: Europe, Australia, and NZ

The wait is over – for some regions, anyway. Pokemon Bank and Poke Transporter have left Japan, and is now available in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

It’s been almost 9 weeks since Nintendo announced and apologized for the delay of Pokemon Bank due to Nintendo Network volume traffic – a lot of which, apparently, was completely based off of use of Pokemon Bank itself, in Japan on its launch there.

Still, it’s great to see the service finally up and available for use in the West, if not yet the US. We’ve already covered these before, but as a quick review, Pokemon Bank allows you to store up to 3,000 Pokemon, in 100 Boxes that can hold 30 Pokemon each. Without using Bank, however, Pokemon X and Y will still allow you to store your Pokemon in PC Boxes in-game.

Pokemon Bank will allow you store Pokemon from different game saves of Pokemon X and Y. Thanks to Poke Transporter, a separate app, you can also transfer Pokemon raised from older games via Poke Transporter.

Using Pokemon Bank nets you several benefits. It opens up unique game events in Kalos. It allows you to collect Battle Points or Pokemon Miles, which can be redeemed for items. Lastly, first use of Pokemon Bank will give you that special edition Celebi. First time users can opt to receive either 100 Poke Miles or 10 Battle Points.

Pokemon Bank will have an annual fee of 4,99 € EUR / 4,49 £ GBP, and has a 30 day trial period redeemable until March 14.

It's been a few hours and there are no reports of outages yet. We'll see how prepared Nintendo is in the coming days.