It's been over a month since Nintendo learned the folly of releasing a major Pokémon online service during the holidays. Its servers crashed and burned for several days, and the Pokémon Bank was quickly pulled from the 3DS eShop. It finally went live in Europe and Australia yesterday, and is now available for North America as well.

The Pokémon Bank is an online storage and transfer application that allows players to manage their Pokémon collections. Transferring Pokémon from the Black/White generation is a one-way trip, but Pokémon will be freely transferrable in and out of the bank to connected X/Y generation games. The service will cost $5 yearly, but comes with a free thirty-day trial.