Pokemon Pokopia Review
Like 50 million other people, I played my first Animal Crossing in March 2020 during the very beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. However, it didn’t become my salvation like it did for many people, because doing chores for Tom Nook for incremental rewards and making my island look better just wasn’t enough incentive. It turns out all that was missing was a little direction and Pokemon.
Pokopia is part Minecraft, part Animal Crossing, and part cosy game wrapped in a Pokemon experience with a storyline that teases the end of humanity, which made Pokemon Pokopia impossible to put down.
9
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Pokopia Review
You awaken as a Ditto, a type of Pokemon that was first introduced in Pokémon Red and Blue, whos special power is being able to mimic another Pokemon’s abilities. Borrowing many different abilities is a unique reasoning for harnessing all kinds of different tools that turn the world of Pokopia into a sandbox where almost anything is possible if you can imagine it.
Upon waking, you will quickly meet Professor Tangrowth, who has been alone and has been collecting whatever junk he could find just like Wall-E with no knowledge of what anything is or does. One of the items that he found was a Pokedex, which he gives to you, right before you both notice a parched squirtle lying in the dry grass looking possibly on the verge of death. After mimicking Squirtle’s ability, you gain the Water Gun ability and can now provide him with a lush green habitat, and add him to your Pokedex. After saving Squirtle’s life, Pokopia truly becomes a choose your own adventure.
You could happily go around watering the entire world, but sticking to the objectives will quickly gain you a few more essential skills for the large part of your journey. You’ll get the ability to grow grass from Bulbasaur, break terrain from Hitmonchan, slice from Scyther and till from Drilbur. These five abilities will provide you most of the skills that you will need to stay busy for hundreds of hours. This would provide the same satisfaction that some people get from pouring out a huge bin of Lego.
As someone who prefers to follow a build guide, Pokopia leaves a lot of breadcrumbs for the player to follow and provides just enough direction. You can use your Pokedex to answer requests from Pokemon, you can go to the PC at the Pokemon to find challenges that need to be completed, you can go try to build houses for you Pokemon, or you can look at Habitat Dex and try to catch rare Pokemon. If you’re really unsure what to do next, you can always ask your mentor on this post apocalyptic island, Professor Tangrowth. Doing any of these jobs will level up Ditto and will inevitably lead you to progress the story, which will expand your world and drip feed you information about what has transpired on this island.
Much like the Minecraft inspiration, Pokopia offers the player as much freedom as they want, but going the other direction, it also provides as much help as the player wants too, which is how it finds the sweet spot. If you want to construct a house square by square, you can do that, but you can also just find or buy the blueprint.
Where Pokopia really separates from the competition is that there is a meaningful and relevant plot hiding in plain sight. You are constantly given hints throughout including items that you will find left behind from the humans and environmental clues for the player to slowly piece things together during their journey.
POKOPIA CRITICISMS
The controls in Pokopia can be slightly finicky when you’re trying to place one block or demolish one block and when constructing blueprints, it would have been nice to get a different view and see how it looks from above on the grid.
Pokopia also features a lot of backtracking. When you eventually expand to other towns, you won’t have a centralized storage unit, so you will constantly have to go back to each town looking for the resources you need. Fast travel is eventually added, but it’s still feels unnecessary. You will also spend a lot of time going back to the PC at the Pokemon Center to track some of your objectives, which would have been great to track them in your Pokedex.
The pace at which you are given new skills could have been spread out more, because you are given five abilities near the beginning of the game, but then don’t receive the remaining three until much later on. With over 1000 Pokemon available, and 300 that were chosen to be in Pokopia, it felt like a missed opportunity that only eight as well as a few extra skills such as jump and strength can be mimicked by Ditto.
By the time your town gets busy, Pokemon find themselves getting in your way quite often, which can become slightly frustrating and on a visual level, the more Pokemon are around you, the more you notice some technical shortcomings with constantly clipping, floating on invisible surfaces, pop in and minor flaws things that shouldn’t be in a marquee Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive.
POKOPIA FINAL THOUGHTS AND SCORE
There’s no denying the obvious Minecraft and Animal Crossing inspirations, but the big difference, outside of the Pokemon charm, is the satisfying gameplay loop. Scientific studies have shown that cleaning reduces cortisol, which is the stress chemical and triggers the release of dopamine, which is the happiness chemical. It also feels really good to get stuff off your to-do list. In most of your sessions, you’ll accomplish next to nothing, but there’s something about completing simple jobs that makes you feel good and Pokopia taps into a blissful dopamine cycle perfectly.
You don’t necessarily need be familiar with Pokemon to enjoy Pokopia, but hardcore fans will definitely get a lot more out of the creature discovery and a story that will resonate stronger. There aren’t too many Pokemon games that remove the core battling element of the franchise, but just like Pokemon Snap, Pokopia is destined to be a classic.
