Pokémon Pokopia wasn’t a game that was particularly on my radar in the buildup to its release. I absolutely love some cozy life-sim type of games, but I find just as many to be a bit lazy and boring. I also have absolutely loved Pokémon at some points in my life, but that love has faded over time, as I feel like the series hasn’t bothered to maximize its potential in quite a while. So a combination of these elements always had a chance to make Pokopia volatile, and thus, it seemed like something way too risky to be excited for. I also don’t own a Switch 2, so obviously, that played a part in my lack of interest as well.
Then, the reviews came out, and they were incredibly glowing. Not only was Pokopia one of the best rated games this year and suddenly a “Game of the Year” type of contender, it was also one of the highest rated Pokémon games of all time. Metacritic doesn’t have aggregate scores for older games like Pokémon Red or Pokémon Silver, but for the Pokémon games that it does have, it’s the highest rated one in the past 20+ years.
I briefly considered buying a Switch 2 just for this game (as I’m surely going to buy it eventually anyway). After thinking about it for a second, I reconsidered and eventually just bought the game for my brother. He let me borrow his Switch 2 for a bit in return. I had the same arrangement with him for Donkey Kong Bananza last year, and it worked out well.
After a few hours with the game, I wasn’t sure when I was going to be able to give my brother his Switch 2 back. Everything about the formula seemed dangerously addictive in a good way. Finding new Pokémon and simply turning the barren looking environment green was addictive. I felt like I was constantly making progress in various ways, and it was incredibly exciting. But within a day, things flipped. The game’s momentum started grinding to a halt, and I went from in love to heading for a breakup almost immediately. After a few more brief attempts, I felt like I was better off moving on from Pokopia. Here are the four big reasons why I fell out of love.
1. Uninspired Early Quest Design
After some early quests that moved pretty fast and smartly introduced you to various mechanics in the game, Pokopia finally moves on to what I’d say is its first “big” quest. In this quest, your goal is to make it rain, as it will help free a trapped Pokémon in the area. In order to do this, you have to raise the humidity in the area. I figured this quest’s purpose was to introduce you to various ways to beautify your area. The quest encourages you to water grass and trees in the area, which definitely enhances the appearance of everything. However, I was shocked when, after doing this, the humidity in the area had barely gone up at all.
From there, I had to do multiple other tasks (none of which really did anything to make my area look any better) before the quest was finally complete. At one point, there was almost nothing I could do to increase my humidity, and I had to putz around until another task to increase my humidity popped up. After a lot of fast moving quests, this one quest took up almost an entire play session for me, and I really wasn’t having any fun with it the entire time.
I was hopeful that this might be the one “bad” quest, as everything else to that point had been pretty brisk, but the quest after that did not get any better. The next task involved raising my “environment level,” which essentially involves enhancing the housing or habitats for your Pokémon (we will talk more about that later) and giving them things that they want, like food or toys. This is another one that took a while, and mostly felt like a grind.
After completing that quest, I currently only have a task that involves farming. I found this task on a different part of the map, so I’m not sure if another quest will unlock later on, but the game hasn’t currently told me how to farm, so I imagine the way to complete this task is to wander around the map until I find someone who helps me figure it out. Once again, it’s not the most compelling quest design.
It’s unfortunate because Pokopia actually has some intriguing story hooks. I’m genuinely interested to find out why all the humans and Pokémon disappeared, but these early story missions don’t dive very deep into that. I also don’t mind if these missions mostly involve doing things that make my area look nicer, and I suppose some of the quests do that to an extent, but the quests are set up in a way where it’s probably easier to “cheese” them over actually doing them in ways to beautify your town. The game seems to lock quite a few important abilities behind doing more of these quests, so it doesn’t do a great job of motivating me to do them the “right” way.
I have heard from friends that the quests get better as you go. I don’t doubt this is true, but the early game is a slog with the tasks that you get. If that were my only problem with the game, I don’t think it would have stopped me… but I have more.
2. Everything Takes Forever, Especially If You Want An Aesthetically Pleasing Area
One of the biggest early milestones in the game is when you can rebuild the destroyed Pokémon Center that is in the center of your opening area. You have to find some specific Pokémon and build up your resources in order to do this. After getting everything ready to go, I was excited to see the fruits of my labor. I then started the process and was told that the Pokémon Center would be done TOMORROW. Not tomorrow in some “in-game” type of way, but actually TOMORROW. In real life. Of course, this Pokémon Center also ties up quite a few of my Pokémon, which can also limit other things I can do around my area. This is how it is with building anything major in the game. Smaller houses take an hour of real-life time to make, and bigger ones can take even longer.
As a parent, this is an incredibly frustrating mechanic. I can’t simply play Pokopia whenever I want. Generally, I can only play games uninterrupted after 8:30 p.m. or so. Reaching a point early in a session where I’m going to essentially limit the amount I can do for the rest of the night just plain sucks. Outside of maybe encouraging addictive personalities to touch grass, I genuinely don’t understand what something like this accomplishes. But it’s not just the artificial waiting for construction that makes it feel like everything in Pokopia takes forever. It’s just naturally how many mechanics in the game operate.
For example, when you enter the first main “city” in Pokopia, it is pretty much completely destroyed. The paths are all broken up, and there aren’t many paths once you get to a certain point outside of town. One of the first things I like to do in games like this is to make nice, clean, and logical paths. I recently had a blast in Octopath Traveler 0’s city builder doing this exact thing. But in Pokopia, even a simple task like this can be a giant chore.
If I want to turn an area into a nicer path, the fastest way I have found is to smash the current tile that I want to change (which takes multiple tries). I then need to equip the specific path block that I want and place it in the hole that I just made. Placing blocks in this game can be a bit finicky, so this whole process for just one square can easily take 10 seconds. Now extrapolate this over a giant world. If I want to change a path block into grass, I can use that same punching method, or I can use the “leafage” skill on a block, which will turn it into a piece of dried out grass. Then I can water it to turn the grass green. Then I can use the “cut” skill to get rid of the tall grass and have nicer grass there instead. It’s just an insane process no matter how I do it. This doesn’t even get into how hard acquiring specific blocks can be early in the game. There’s a nice brick path in one part of my town, and I currently have no idea how to acquire that type of path block right now, so I’m mostly stuck with that path looking pretty shitty.
All of this makes the thought of making my little area beautiful incredibly intimidating. Every time I looked at how messed up my “home base” area was, I couldn’t imagine how much time it would take to make it look even somewhat presentable.
It doesn’t help that the game kind of forces you to make your world a bit uglier before you can beautify it more. You don’t catch Pokémon in Pokopia with Poké Balls like in a classic Pokémon game. You get them by building them a “habitat”. This generally involves setting up an area that fits in with what the Pokémon is all about. Several Pokémon are found simply by building up a patch of tall grass in classic Pokémon fashion. Some are found by building grass next to a body of water. Ghost Pokémon are found by building a grave and putting some other ornaments around that grave. It’s pretty clever. But also, it makes your area look ugly. Once you start building a bunch of habitats, your area can kind of look like a dump, with random patches of grass, flowers, trees, graves, and campfires all over the place.
The easiest way to clean things up and to make your Pokémon the happiest is to build them homes. It’s a much better look to have a nice set of homes instead of a hodgepodge of different environments in my view, and it makes it much easier to accommodate the various needs that each of your Pokémon have. However, unless you strategically build all of your habitats well away from where you want to have your “town,” this means that you are often building up habitats just to get rid of them. From there, you also must wait hours or even the rest of the day to get those houses up because of long construction times. And every time a house is being built, you can’t do anything with the Pokémon that are building until it’s done.
Once again, as a working father who does not want Pokopia to be my entire gaming personality, the mechanics just demand way too much of my time and energy, and the rewards for that time just never felt substantial enough.
3. Who’s That Pokemon? More Like Where The FUCK Is That Pokemon?
Another part of my “everything takes forever” spiel is how the game handles teaming up with its Pokémon, but it also feels worthy of its own bullet point.
There are no Poké Balls in the world of Pokopia. This seems apropos, as putting Pokémon in a PRISON doesn’t seem very cozy to me.
But as cruel as Poké Balls have always felt to me, I constantly missed them here. Instead of being able to summon your Pokémon instantly, you have to physically find them and bring them to where you need their help in order to use them, and there are plenty of things you have to use them for. Certain actions like lighting a fire or quickly growing a plant require you to have certain Pokémon alongside you (I’m sure you eventually can use these skills yourself, but this is how it is early on). You also have to gather up specific Pokémon to build houses, which can be really annoying. The houses have a menu screen where you can see all of the types of Pokémon you need in order to build it. I don’t understand why you can’t just use this menu to instantly summon available Pokémon that you need. It would save tons of time and effort.
If you are looking for a specific Pokémon but don’t see them, the main way you can find them is by opening up your Pokédex and asking another Pokémon around you where they are. I’m sure you will eventually unlock more skills that help with this, too, but once again, this is how it is early on. The process feels so unnecessarily cumbersome. I want to build up my town, and playing hide-and-seek all the time gets in the way of that.
I had a few other annoyances as well. You need to give Pokémon items to help make important building resources. But if you use a Pokémon for this, you aren’t told how long it will take to finish, so you are kind of in the dark and just have to wander and find other things to do until they are done. Once again, this is a very annoying feature for a busy person.
4. God Awful Inventory Management
This is a small issue, but I feel like it could have very easily become a big one the further I went into the game.
While you can carry a decent amount of items in Pokopia, you are eventually going to acquire way more than you need. It’s just inevitable. Unfortunately, the storage chests in Pokopia are not unlimited, and they don’t appear to be linked in any way. So finding a specific item when you need it is constantly a bit of a chore.
Like, it’s literally a chore. By the end of my time with the game, I had built up something like six storage chests, and I had them organized by type in order to keep things straight, but it just feels unnecessarily difficult. It takes way too long to find specific items once you start getting a lot of them, and once again, this is just a task that gets in the way of the actual fun parts of the game. And I really feared this annoyance getting way worse as things went along.
Final Thoughts
Despite all my complaints, I think anyone can see that there is a very good game inside Pokopia. I recently saw a viral tweet that asked people what game they would play if they had to play just one like it was a job for a full year. I actually would heavily consider Pokopia for such a monumental task. Playing one video game for that many hours would kill my enjoyment for almost anything I have ever played, but Pokopia has so much to do that if you really invest the time, I’m sure it can reward you with an incredible sense of accomplishment.
But that is also the problem. I feel like you really have to put the time into this one to feel good about what you are doing, and I simply didn’t have the time or patience to get to that point. I feel like other games in the genre get you to a point where you feel like you can actually make “progress” in a reasonable amount of time. I’m not a huge Animal Crossing fan, but New Horizons had me genuinely hooked for two weeks. I really worked hard at decorating my town in that game. I felt like I was another week of “work” away from even thinking about “decorating” my town in Pokopia.
I can totally see why others are in love with this game. I am very clearly in the minority here. There was a chance that if I put another 10 hours in, this game would turn around for me. But I just don’t have the drive to push to that point and see if it happens, because I am at least slightly doubtful that it will. There are too many little things that wear me down with Pokopia. I’ll be curious to see if some patches come, and if it works a little better for me when I have my own Switch 2 later this year or early next. But for now, I’m leaving the Withered Wasteland, and I have no regrets.
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