Yep, to the surprise of no-one really Nintendo will use the NFC abilities of the WiiU gamepad to allow you to scan Pokemon into your game.

http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/03/13/pokemon-wii-u-game-follows-in-skylanders-footsteps

What IS surprising is that it's for a downloadable Pokemon Rumble game.

Personally I find this to be a horrid idea.

Not that Nintendo would use Pokemon to pimp toys, they have been doing that for years and in no game does the toy/game connection make more sense than in Pokemon.   Really a full Pokemon game on WiiU which allowed you to truly (as in, in real life) collect them all, would crush Skylanders in sales of both games and toys.  (Not a portable style pokemon (where it'd take away from gameplay if you are able to merely buy hard to capture ones) but at least a Coliseum style with a storyline that allowed this functionality)

So it seems like an incredible waste that Nintendo would instead squander that potential on a Pokemon Rumble game and $2 toys.

What you guys think?  

Parents are going to hate this...

I think that the game should also be released in retail. I guess this is just to test, since they won't risk much with a game like Pokémon Scramble/Rumble.
Has it been confirmed for NA and EU yet?

I think that this is more of a test to see how well the idea of NFC things to unlock Pokemon in a game works. Japan is going to eat this alive.....especially if they end up releasing all of the Pokemon as figurines.

Personally, I think Nintendo would clean up if they reissued Pokemon cards with NFC in conjunction with a Pokemon Stadium/Colosseum experience. The main single player would allow you to roam around the open world, catch and train Pokemon just like the good old days. For battles on and offline, you can either use the cards to use a Pokemon, or you can use the ones you have trained.

Healing items and the like can also be placed on cards so that you aren't buying a pack of straight Pokemon....keeps people buying. The trading cards were HUGE when they first released and as far as I can tell, they have fallen by the wayside.

The issue would be avoiding "pay to win." One solution would be that while the Pokemon in the card packs could be rare, they wouldn't be super powered and perhaps tailored to the level class of the battle (when chosen...not on a card by card basis). This would allow the people who spend the time training their Pokemon to potentially defeat people with more rare Pokemon, but also give card owners a fighting chance by using strategy to prevail.

The cards also solve the issue of having 600+ figurines laying around. Cards are easily stackable and can be put into card books (I still have all of my original Pokemon cards because of those )

On the one hand, that sounds pretty half-assed. On the other, I am really, really not a fan of the Skylanders approach of making people buy hunks of plastic garbage to play those characters in a game, so I'm glad there are only a few figures.

Are you kidding?  Which would you rather buy: $2 Pokemons or $15 Skylanders?   I think parents will be grantful because Nintendo could easily have created a Full retail Pokemon game and $15 toys that they'd have to buy.    Rumble also won't hold the kids attention for very long.   So it'll save parents a lot of money.

How many Pokemons are in the game? If you count all those $2 toys you will waste a lot of money. Especially since you have to "catch them all!".

But this is Pokemon Rumble which gives little incentive to collect more than a few favorite characters.   I'd buy my son/daughter five of them and wait for them to get bored of Rumble's shallow gameplay. 

Gotta buy them all!

For a moment I thought this was about mainline Pokemon games. good to see that its not