What was the last Pokémon game released for the Nintendo DS?

The last core Pokémon games released for the Nintendo DS were Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: June 23, 2012 in Japan and October 7, 2012 in North America. The spin-off shelf closed in the same season, with Pokémon Conquest arriving that spring and summer. After them, the series moved up a generation of hardware and never came back: Pokémon X and Y opened the 3DS era on October 12, 2013, with the first simultaneous worldwide launch in the series' history.

The timing is what makes the sequels remarkable as objects. The Nintendo 3DS had been on sale for over a year when Black 2 and White 2 launched, yet the games were built for the DS, enhanced quietly for the DSi and playable on a 3DS, but native to the older machine and its enormous installed base. Their companion app crossed the line the games themselves would not: Dream Radar ran only on the 3DS, a small bridge from one era to the next.

So the DS era of Pokémon runs from Diamond and Pearl in 2006 to the sequels in 2012: two full generations, one remake pair, and a shelf of spin-offs, more distinct Pokémon releases than any other single Nintendo system had carried. Every one of them still plays on the hardware in this Library's photographs, and most of them still trade with each other across a table, no servers required.

The era did not end because the DS stopped working. It ended because the series left, and the cartridges stayed: a complete, self-contained Pokémon world, the last one built before the games learned to update themselves.