Pokemon Pokopia: 5 stars

I consider myself a moderate Pokemon fan.

I've played 4 of the mainline games, but in general I didn't really start to play any video games until high school so I missed out on most of the foundational Pokemon experiences most people my age had.

My first game was Pokemon Pearl on the Nintendo DS, and I enjoyed it so much I quickly bought Pokemon Platinum when it released shortly after. The next game that I played was Pokemon Soul Silver, which was a 10th anniversary re-release of Pokemon Silver – which many consider the best generation of Pokemon games. The last game that I played (though I didn't get very far before I got busy and never returned) was an emulator version of either Ruby, Sapphire, or Emerald. My gut tells me I picked Sapphire because that's my birth stone, but there's no way to know for sure at this point.

All that is to say I am quite familiar with the lore, especially because I also watched many episodes of the TV show when I was growing up (though I watched it in a pretty disorganized fashion).

Pokopia Release

I have not kept up with the franchise in the past 5 or so years however, so I only heard about Pokopia 2 days after it had already released. I saw several clips of the gameplay and was immediately interested, but it quickly died down when I saw it was exclusive to the Switch 2.

I couldn't justify buying a whole new console just to play (what I was perceiving as) Pokemon Minecraft. Then I spent another week watching more and more clips and I was slowly finding more justification to buy it.

I finally caved and bought the Switch 2 in order to play it, and I have no regrets.

Zero Spoiler Review

Truly a five-star game. I have almost no notes for the developers, and anything I have thought of is so minor or so specific to my personal preferences I'm not even going to mention it here.

Without ruining any of the major plot points in the game, I can say the game is NOT just Pokemon Minecraft, though the comparison makes some sense since Minecraft is obviously the most popular block-based building game. But I think this comparison sells the game incredibly short.

The mechanics are great and the use of Ditto as the playable character is genius. A few of the abilities come with a bit of a learning curve because there are so many use cases for them, but nothing that I found to be an inhibitor to enjoying the game.

The character interactions are simply adorable. Yes, the dialogue for non-story mode interactions is weirdly full of "yo" and a few other strange word choices but I don't think it would add any real benefit to the game if they had given each Pokemon more individuality in the dialogue, not to mention that it would be a huge task with 300 Pokemon included at launch.

Just focusing on the dialogue that occurs from main and secondary story-line conversations though, I found myself laughing or saying "aww" out loud in response to many of the moments. The game does a great job of making the Pokemon real characters that you can connect with more than your average NPC.

Story Progression

Following the story quests can certainly be overwhelming if you are also trying to build your world at the same time because the game doesn't force you to follow any tasks after the initial tutorial. You can choose what order to unlock the major areas, you can ignore key story tasks in favour of decorating your place to perfection, and so much more.

I chose to not tie myself down to any specific plan when I started and to just go with the flow. I ended up finishing the entire story with around 75 hours in-game. I'm avoiding including spoilers even for minor aspects of the game, so all I will say is based on what I've seen in people's videos it would seem that I took a non-traditional path through the different areas that you unlock. If the goal of my play-through was to take the optimal path, I was lost deep in the woods.

There are some abilities that are more beneficial to unlock sooner and I unlocked those much later which technically made it harder and slower for me to progress through the first half of the story. That being said, I don't think it is a negative thing and I certainly didn't lose out on any fun because of it.

I certainly had the thought "well this would have been super useful 10 hours ago!" but in the moment I was enjoying the progression and I didn't know there was a faster way to do the tasks anyway. Nothing ever felt too tedious and looking back I think it was great that I inadvertently forced myself to take some parts of the game slower than I usually would.

The Endgame

Having reached the end of the story, and even though I did with a lot of meandering and detours, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of the game. There are TONS of things to do in terms of taking care of my Pokemon, attracting new ones to join my island, building stuff, plus all the multi-player possibilities.

To give you an idea of how much I still have left in the game, I have met just over 100 Pokemon out of the potential 300. And I did a significant amount of habitat building and Pokemon recruiting outside of the main story quests.

Even if I had already discovered most of the Pokemon there is still the huge task of perfecting your habitats and making them as happy as possible. None of my areas have reached a 10/10 comfort level and most of my Pokemon are still living in the original habitats they spawned in with a random assortment of furniture.

Strongly Recommended

If you like Pokemon I definitely think this game is a must buy. The story is strong enough that it can stand alone even if you don't care for the cozy gameplay / sandbox mode that comes after the story.

If you only care for the cozy gameplay / building and don't care for the Pokemon lore, the game is still great because the story is not difficult by any means. You could consider the story an extended tutorial for the eventual freeplay that comes once you've unlocked all the areas and (most of the) abilities – which happens about halfway through the story.

I definitely see myself playing this game for a long time, even if there are no future updates or DLCs released.

After I loot and destroy a few more dream islands I will hopefully be able to start properly building my own cloud island and then maybe I will share my code publicly for people to visit it.