Pokemon Pokopia. Where do I even begin? The game that has sucked up more of my free time than I care to admit since launch on March 5 has turned out to be everything I hoped for and then some. I could just say, “This game is fantastic; you should try it,” and get back to playing, but I suppose I should do my job and explain why.
Pokemon Pokopia is part Animal Crossing, part Minecraft, and part Dragon Quest Builders, all wrapped in the massively popular world of Pokemon. You play as a Ditto who takes on the form of its former human trainer and begins exploring a post-apocalyptic version of the Kanto region, beginning in Fuschia City. Something horrible has apparently happened here. The place is a mess of ruins and decay, all of the humans are missing, and so are all of the Pokemon, save for yourself and Professor Tangrowth, an intelligent (and seemingly elderly) Tangrowth you meet shortly after diving in.
Professor Tangrowth serves as your guide through the story, but even he’s at a loss as to what happened to all of the humans and wild Pokemon that used to call these lands home. You’ll need to work together to figure it out.
But there are more important things to worry about than this grand mystery, at least at first, as you quickly come across a parched Squirtle, and discover just how valuable Ditto’s powers of transformation are (and will be) across your journey. Squirtle can squirt water, and once meeting, so can Ditto, letting you revive the Squirtle and start to grow lush foliage where dry, cracked dirt now stands.
What’s more, as you begin to repair the land, you’ll discover you can create actual habitats for Pokemon to live in, which draws them back to the world. The more Pokemon you create homes for, the more friends you’ll make, the more of Ditto’s abilities you’ll unlock. Throw in some resource collection and crafting tables, and you’ll start making habitats of much greater variety, allowing you to attract all manner of Pokemon in the process.
The gameplay loop here is fairly simple. Create Pokemon habitats, finish quests to make your new friends happy, and fix things up to raise the town’s environment level. Each level unlocks new challenges for you to complete, which reward coins that can be spent in the store, again, on a growing selection of items and crafting recipes as the town levels up.
There are multiple major towns to discover here, each with a main quest that needs to be completed before you can move on to the next. For instance, Fuschia City starts out with drought-like conditions, and you’ll be challenged to make it rain. Simple enough, but the major quests become much more complicated with time, and the late game can be a bit of a grind to get through, depending on how you’ve handled the earlier portions. I don’t mind a grind and backtracking to finish everything everywhere, but I can also see this being a bit of a sticking point for some.
Similarly, the game allows you to construct actual buildings, in addition to simple habitats, but whereas habitats are “finished” as soon as the correct objects are placed together in the proper orientation, buildings (like houses for Pokemon) take time to complete, with the game utilizing a real-time day and night cycle. Some timers are short — around 15 minutes to build a small Pokemon den — while other projects may not be finished until “tomorrow.”
While this fits the game’s vibe — making relaxing, peaceful progression as you bring life back to the world — it may be off-putting to those looking for more instant gratification. Thankfully, the game doesn’t penalize you for time traveling, and you can do so without even closing the software. Whether or not you consider this “cheating” will be a personal decision. (Here, “time traveling” refers to the act of changing your Switch 2’s internal date and time so a game thinks time has passed).
To say that Pokemon Pokopia is a game about discovery is almost an understatement. Like in other life sim and town building games, you start with nothing and eventually build up a massive hoard of items, but along the way, the game never loses its sense of wonder. I regularly found myself exploring areas I thought I had “completed” only to climb a mountain or bust a hole in a cliff to discover another huge area I never knew existed, which is full of more resources to collect and ruins from the crumbling human civilization that was there before.
While the gameplay here is incredibly cozy and charming, it’s nicely juxtaposed against this sad backdrop. Reading found documents fills in the gaps in the plot and lets you slowly put together what must have happened here, but it’s never so somber as to ruin the joy of repairing and expanding upon what had once been abandoned.
And that joy is even more prevalent when playing with friends. Visitors can tour your towns in spectator mode and meet Pokemon they may yet to have befriended themselves. You can take pictures of your friends’ items and use a 3D printer back home to make copies of them (useful if you’ve yet to find them in your own game), and you even can use Ditto’s transformation ability to play an unofficial game of prop hunt, which is a wild, but terrific inclusion here (think hide-and-seek, but with players “hiding” by taking on the appearance of inanimate objects).
And then there’s Palette Town, a truly massive expanse of different biomes where friends can decorate and build together with almost complete freedom (or you can go it alone, if you’d like). When I tell you my jaw dropped when I saw the sheer scale of this place, I mean it. Even if you regularly played with friends, it would likely take the average person / group months, if not years to fully decorate the space. Animal Crossing: New Horizons still has dedicated players now six years after its release, and Palette Town should give Pokopia the same longevity.
Pokemon Pokopia is everything I could want in a video game. It’s Pokemon. It’s a life sim. It’s got collecting, crafting, gardening, exploration, puzzles, and more. If you’re into quests and constant forward progress, you’ve got that. If you want to put on some music and spend an hour repairing broken bridges and clearing debris from the beach — while completely ignoring the main quest — you can do that, too.
Meeting each new Pokemon is a delight (“Who’s going to show up next?!”), and it’s easy to get lost in the smaller details, like factoring in the weather or sunlight when deciding where to build a home for a specific Pokemon (Charmander doesn’t want to be exposed to the rain, Duskull wants his home to be dark, and so on). And even with so many systems and so much “stuff” to account for, the formula here is nearly perfect and I find myself struggling for things to truly complain about. Pokemon Pokopia is a master class in cozy game design and an absolute triumph.