I make no secret of how much I enjoy the Pokemon series. Though it can be samey at times, and not samey enough at others, the games always manage to pull me in and keep me hooked for hundreds of hours at a time. This is true for the main series, but it remains just as true for the spin-offs. The Mystery Dungeon Games, the Ranger games, even Pokemon Conquest, they each take the titular characters and use them in new and creative ways. Now with the backing of Koei Tecmo, we’ve got a new series that aims to smash the creativity of Dragon Quest Warriors with the day to day musings of Animal Crossing using Pokemon as a backdrop. And I’m completely on board with that. 

Into the Wasteland

You start with very little in Pokopia. Waking up as a lone Ditto in a wasteland, you meet a smart-looking Tangrowth (they have glasses) who is just as confused as you are as to where everybody went off to. Just because you start out alone, it doesn’t mean you have to stay that way though. Making use of Ditto’s transformation abilities, you’re soon put to work imitating Pokemon to bring the wasteland back to life. You start by spraying water on dry grass and withered trees, but soon find yourself pulling clumps of grass from the ground, before moving onto being able to smash it up yourself and really get stuck in with making the world your own. 

The game progresses in a fairly repetitive way that manages to stay fresh for the fact you don’t necessarily feel rushed to do it all at once. Each region follows a very similar structure of making habitats to get a small group of Pokemon together, and then working with these Pokemon to progress a simple series of requests to fix an issue exclusive to the region. At the end of these requests you’ll get a short bout of divine intervention, and then you’re mostly just left to your own devices. 

In terms of storyline there isn’t a terrible amount, and if you just stuck to the main series of requests you could very well get to the end of the game with very little idea of what’s going on. It’s easy to draw a comparison to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. You’re in a largely desolate world and the key story events are behind you, found through collectable fragments of information that you could just as easily skip over. You see the end result of that story in the environment itself, with the larger image coming into focus as you find those scraps. 

It’s not especially deep, and the way it’s presented is very gradual until you’re hit with one or two pieces of information that answer the majority of your questions all at once. I felt this way of storytelling was a much better fit here though when compared to the Zelda titles. The reality of Pokopia is that what happened in the past is secondary. Even as you gain this knowledge, the actual characters in-game come no closer to the truth since, amusingly, they can’t read the human language all the good stuff is written in. Instead the focus is on the rebuilding process. It’s a sad and empty world that you’re gradually bringing back to life, and the focus of its inhabitants is squarely on moving forwards. 

A World of Pokemon

The world of Pokopia is split between four major areas for the sake of the story, with one additional sandbox area also available to you from the start. There’s a surprising amount there to keep you occupied, though you’re likely to find yourself frustrated if you’re the type of person who wants to do everything right out of the gate. Progress is incremental, with new abilities and quality of life features presented to you as you play more. Things start really quite slow, but that pacing does give you some time to adjust to the controls and appreciate things as they arrive.  

There are 14 abilities in total, with most of these using Ditto’s transformation abilities as a basis. Some of these just make getting around easier, with even jumping being locked at the start of the game, while others go much further in expanding exactly what you’re able to do in terms of interacting with the world. I do like how the abilities are unlocked as a whole. Abilities are generally presented as a solution to a region-specific problem that you can then take with you and apply more generally. You’re rarely stuck wanting for an ability, though once you have it it’s often difficult to imagine how you coped before. 

I only really found one major choke point early on, and that was the limited inventory space. Add to this a fairly chaotic storage system that has you opening and closing chest after chest to find your items, and you have an early game that can be frustrating. In some ways you could argue this is good design. By limiting you out of the gate, you’ll be more eager to engage with the story content instead of straying vastly off-course. You’ll find upgrades through doing this and be encouraged to further engage and continue this cycle. Admittedly I was frustrated when playing for the first time, but I can appreciate what they were going for here. 

Looking beyond the scope of the main story and the various Pokemon requests, Pokopia layers a decent number of systems on top of each other to create a world that’s genuinely fun to just play and create in. At its most basic the game sees you building habitats that Pokemon will be drawn to. Alongside the Pokedex, you’ll also have a Habitat Dex that tracks these, showing you where a given habitat can still attract more Pokemon, and under what conditions. Once you’ve attracted a Pokemon, it’s down to you to make them more comfortable. This could be done by adding decoration to the habitat they were originally drawn to, or by building them an entirely new house and having them move in. There’s a lot of freedom to how you go about raising the Environment Level of a given area, with it being tied to how comfortable the area’s residents are. As you raise the Environment Level, you’ll unlock new recipes to craft, as well as blueprints to create certain buildings. Both these recipes and buildings are thematically tied to a given region, giving you a reason to come back later and continue development once the story content has concluded. 

One thing I was somewhat surprised to see implemented in the game was electricity, with Pokopia giving you a decent number of ways to both generate and distribute it to bring the various electronics on offer back to life. There’s nothing too complex here, with it largely boiling down to having generators being connected by utility poles, and those utility poles being close to the things that need power. I did find it fun planning out where I wanted these things though, and figuring out how I could hide these power lines in certain more scenic areas while still keeping their utility. 

There’s also farming, which does fit the cosy nature of the game well. Much like with electricity it’s a simple system, with crops growing endlessly from a single seed and you being able to harvest them daily. You don’t really need much more than that here though. You’re not selling your crops to survive, instead they’re just food that you can either eat as they are, share with your Pokemon friends, or cook into a meal to enhance some of your abilities. 

Another Day in Paradise

When the game was originally announced, I really couldn’t grasp the comparisons to Animal Crossing. To me this was always Dragon Quest Builders 3, but a hundred or so hours later, I can say I get it now. There’s more to it than just talking with your Pokemon friends like you would the residents of your town in Animal Crossing though. That is still that chunk of the Animal Crossing, but it’s not the part I’m most interested in. 

The big standout in my mind was the music. It captures everything that makes Animal Crossing music iconic so wonderfully. We get a combination of familiar tracks from the Pokemon world slowed down with less impact. It can feel sad, empty, but faintly familiar in a way that pulls you into the environment in a way I really didn’t anticipate. It’s distinctly Pokemon music, but presented in a way that is comfortable, fading into the background and allowing you to really focus on what you’re looking at. I’m no expert on describing soundtracks, but I would encourage anybody interested to look up what Pokopia has to offer here. 

What you also get is daily events, and this real time progression is arguably the most crucial part of making Animal Crossing what it is. There’s a few areas of the game that are tied to real time. The prefab buildings will take anywhere from 15 minutes to a full day to complete, you have daily quests that provide a renewable source of coins to redeem on recipes and items, a daily randomly-generated island you can visit as a renewable source of ores and other resources. There are also seasonal events much like in Animal Crossing, with the first one having just passed by with helping Hoppip collect cotton spores. More than anything though, you feel more a part of the world for seeing it cycle from day to day. It’s pleasant and it’s comfortable.

Tying together that comfort and really being the point that separates this from its Dragon Quest Builders lineage is the complete lack of combat. The complete lack of damage, of fall damage, of any kind of consequence for drowning or throwing yourself into lava. The world is presented as desolate and abandoned, but it’s driven home quite early on that it isn’t dangerous. For some fans of Dragon Quest Builders 2 I could understand seeing this as a downgrade. Combat was improved from the first game, and given the nature of Pokemon as a whole, there is genuinely a lot that could have been done here. I’m not disappointed though. In abandoning combat the game really shines a light on creating and on building. I do also somewhat enjoy the connotation that all Pokemon conflict is derived from trainers forcing them to fight. This is a game that wears its influences on its sleeve, but manages to feel separate and unique to each of them. 

Playing with Friends

Where Pokopia both shines and falls short is in its multiplayer components. It’s one of those situations where there are some hefty limitations, but if you can accept those limitations you’ll have a grand time of it. So exactly what is limited? Well of the five regions available to you, you can only build with friends in one of them. This is the previously-mentioned sandbox area that has no relation to the game’s story. The rest of the game you’re able to wander around, chat with Pokemon, and play hide and seek if that’s something you enjoy. You can’t build though. I can understand this being a deal breaker for some. 

To get the most out of the multiplayer parts of the game, you need to first put in the time by yourself. When playing online you can’t bring along any of your items, but you do retain any recipes and abilities you’ve unlocked. This means that if you’ve got through the story already, you can keep much of what I would consider to be your progress. It all feels very much like a post-game activity, which will be a disappointment for those who wanted to work their way through the game’s various quests with a child or friend. If you’re happy to think of it as post-game content though, I do think there’s a lot to like. 

It's advised you don't visit early on, but the sandbox area is available right from the start.

There are two main areas of multiplayer activity: the local sandbox area, and the online-only Cloud Island. The best way I can describe these is in Minecraft terms. The local sandbox area is like opening up your own world to multiplayer, requiring you to be active as a host, and with all the items gathered and Pokemon found staying in your world. You can also access this via GameShare, allowing somebody without the game to play with you. The Cloud Island on the other hand is much like a Minecraft Realm. Every player gets one, with the island being stored server-side. This means you, as the island owner, don’t need to be online for others to have access. Up to three other people can be on the Cloud Island at any one time, with one additional slot always being reserved for you as the owner. These options are honestly a lot more than I would have expected, with the Cloud Island being where I’ve spent most of my time after working through the main story content. 

Almost everything you can do offline can be done on the Cloud Island. Each island comes with its own Pokedex for you to fill, and everything can be built up just as you’ve already done by yourself. You can even visit a daily Dream Island with friends to gather resources. Really the only thing that’s missing is the seasonal events, with the recent Hoppip event being absent. It’s a bit of a shame, but it never really dampened the experience for me. 

The island you get contains a combination of each biome available in the main game. This gets you off the ground quickly, and allows you to get every Pokemon without going hugely out of your way. There’s no kind of story quests available, much like with the offline sandbox area, so you really are just free to build and play as you see fit. If you’re after a game to be playing with friends over a long period of time, steadily building up an island is a lot of fun. 

A Switch 2 Exclusive

With Pokopia being exclusive to the Switch 2, you’re likely wondering just how it’s making use of the system’s more unique features. One area stands out here above all others: mouse controls. Now I have made use of mouse controls on the JoyCon 2 since buying the console at launch. I thought it was fairly novel in Rune Factory, and it tends to make browsing the eShop a bit cleaner. Pokopia is the first game the vision has really clicked though. 

I started out using the Pro Controller 2, but soon shifted to just having detached Joy Cons when I was getting serious about building. It all just works really well. You can move about and move the camera with the right stick as normal, then place down the right or left Joy Con and have more precision when needed. It automatically moves you into the ability to destroy blocks too, streamlining things nicely. I will also throw in a note here to say that all the controls in Pokopia are remappable in-game. It’s not something I made extensive use of, but I’m sure many will appreciate the option all the same. 

Performance on the Switch 2 is something I never really took note of, which is to say that I had no issues at all with it. The game targets 60fps in both docked and handheld modes, and I’ve seen no indication that it misses the mark on either. The graphics don’t feel compromised for this performance either. You will see some pop-in, especially when looking into the distance on some of the more open areas, but it’s not something that stands out terribly. The game tends to have you focusing on what’s around you in a more immediate sense, so it’s only really when moving from area to area I’m reminded of it. 

Pokemon… Crossing Builders?

Pokemon Pokopia might just be my favourite game so far on Nintendo’s latest system. It is fantastic alone, with the world and scope expanding brilliantly if you have others to play with. At its core, it feels like the Dragon Quest Builders team were asked to remake Animal Crossing using Pokemon, and it all works so much better than I could have ever anticipated. The end result is a game that manages to build wonderfully on each of the games that it pulls inspiration from, bringing together something cosy and creative with a Pokemon flair. For fans of that style of laid back experience, this is an unmissable game.