Pokemon Pokopia

What could have been a very agreeable, cosy Pokémon-themed life sim winds up being so much more thanks to unrelenting ideals of community, conservation and creativity. Pokémon Pokopia defies being quantified or talked about in mechanical terms because what it offers isn't quantifiable or mechanical, it's a soothing balm and nourishment for the soul.

Pokemon Pokopia invites us to discover, explore, rebuild, and reconnect, rewarding us for every action along the way.

Pokémon Pokopia is the best Pokémon game in years. It brilliantly combines addictive gameplay and interesting level design with the beloved franchise, creating a polished and fresh blend of several genres.

Simply put, Pokémon Pokopia is one of Pokémon's best spin-offs yet. It effortlessly combines the charm of Animal Crossing and Minecraft while imbuing the end result with all the best elements of monster catching. Regardless of whether you're a fan of Animal Crossing, Pokémon, Dragon Quest Builders, or are just looking to jump into something new, Pokopia will hook you in and keep you coming back for weeks.

I have had a very pleasant time in Pokopia, which never ceases to feed me with new things to do. Pokémon's living conditions must be improved, items must be built, and properties must be planned. We've probably all experienced the kind of game where you repeat the mantra "I'll just do this too" over and over again until you finally look up and realise that it's five in the morning and you haven't slept a wink. That's my experience of Pokopia in a nutshell, and I already feel the urge to dive back in.

Indeed, perhaps Pokopia's finest accomplishment is that it caters equally to all kinds of player: those who love to build freely, and those who crave more direction. If you're the kind of Pokemon obsessive who plays every entry and spinoff, you'll find plenty here to delight. And if you're an older or lapsed fan, or Pokemon has passed you by completely? Well, ditto. [Issue#423, p.118]

There is a fun time to be had here, but ultimately Pokemon Pokopia doesn't explore the Pokemon side of its world and offers building quests that are mostly rigid and repetitive. As ever with Pokemon, there is enough charm to see it through, and the mechanics aren't shallow, even if they're used in aid of the same few tasks over and over again.

Incredible game. My favorite so far this year. This game is going to get nominated for game of the year.

7 - Great. I’ve never played Dragon Quest builders though people claim Pokopia is just a reskin of it. I’ve played some sandbox/city builders like Animal Crossing, a bit of Minecraft, and some others but it’s not a genre I have extensive experience in. So I may be woefully oblivious to the highs of the genre but my limited exposure tells me Pokopia is the best. It has a mix of elements that make it engaging in multiple ways. It’s got excellent item collecting and interior design like Animal Crossing, it’s got the sandbox block building of Minecraft, it’s got a villager system that is incredibly engaging. The Pokémon have unique personalities, engage with your builds in interesting ways, play together, ask you for things, react negatively to changes they don’t like, and more. And on top of all that, Pokopia is the only city builder I’ve played that had an engaging single player narrative and progression. The structure from area to area is really well implemented and culminates in a profoundly melancholic, yet hopeful finale. The postgame reward is perfect and with the 2 additional DLC areas releasing I can promise you I’ll be hanging around for a long while yet. I loved the unique problems each new area presented and how traversing them all felt completely different. Palette Town is a perfect addition as a blank slate where you’re encouraged to use all the tools you’ve gained to make your ideal Pokémon settlement. There’s just so much room for creativity to flourish. Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be going back to the comparatively restrictive Animal Crossing any time soon.

A content-packed cozy game with a lively, interactive cast of Pokémon that offers surprisingly sophisticated systemic interactions. Your building feels alive thanks to Pokémon constantly interacting with the environment, and making your Pokémon happy and providing for their needs is both rewarding and genuinely heartwarming. However, if you're coming from other sandbox games, particularly voxel sandboxes, there are certain flaws that may make you appreciate the game considerably less. Its building and resource-management systems can feel surprisingly laborious, while loading times, inventory management, and repetitive progression introduce friction that becomes increasingly noticeable the more seriously you engage with the sandbox.

The first few ours are really fun. But it gets boring really fast and looks really cheap.

Overall, I feel like if I had spent 50 hours completing the game, I would have felt fairly good about it. Instead, I spent 150 hours completing the game, and didn’t even 100% it. This is, frankly, pretty absurd, and it is because of the game wasting your time that it takes so long. The game simply does not respect your time in the end, and the QOL issues end up becoming increasingly frustrating as you get deeper and deeper into the game, as you have to manage more and more resources, and if you run out of an essential resource, you then have to go farm more of it – which can be especially problematic if the resource is something you mine, as then you have to go to a Dream Island to get it, which does nothing to progress the main game. Each area has a ruined Pokémon Center with a PC in it. When you fiddle with these PCs, you are informed that there is some sort of app called PokeLife running on them. You are told that your goal is to restore the environment; by building habitats for Pokémon, they will return (hooray!) and you can make friends with them. You can then further raise the environmental level in each area by building better homes for the Pokemon, ones that are suitable for their particular needs; this will allow the PC to sell you additional items and recipes to help you along your way. The game is very much a crafting centric game; you gather resources to make into items to build better houses for Pokemon or build new environments for Pokemon to inhabit, so that you can get more Pokemon, etc. Along the way you meet a number of notable Pokemon who give you various sorts of quests; in each area, you start out by meeting a Pokemon, who will then lead you through a series of other Pokemon, who end up teaching you new abilities that you use to gather resources and traverse the environments. You start out with very limited abilities (you can’t even jump!) but by the end of the game you can bust through walls, fly, produce pools of water (and other liquids), and do a number of other things. The Pokemon are somewhat similar to Animal Crossing villagers, in that there are a few “special” ones (the questgivers, some of which are unique Pokémon variants to this game) plus a bunch of ones with more generic personalities. However, all of them have unique appearances (being Pokemon), preferences that have various idiosyncrasies, and special abilities that you can exploit to help you (like being able to grow plants faster, spurt out water, trade items to you, gather items on their own, produce items that they leave around their home for you to find, etc.). There’s actually several dozen abilities in the game, some of which correspond to abilities related to building structures – there are special bespoke structures in the game you have to recruit Pokemon to help you build, so it is important to get all the abilities on Pokemon that you need in order for them to build these structures after you’ve gathered the resources they need to do it. Overall, the game suffers a bit from being repetitive – you go through the main story and the main story is honestly fairly decent in terms of getting you through and getting you to do new things, but the more time you spend in the game, the more you end up going through familiar patterns of resource gathering and building homes and whatnot, as the game doesn’t actually have that much variety to send at you. There is no combat, so the game is all about traversal, but this also being a mine-craft/terraria like game where you can place blocks in the environment around you, it is not all that difficult to get where you need to go, either. So in the end, it is mostly about following directions and building habitats for Pokemon, over and over again, and after a couple areas, it starts to get a bit samey. They do try to mix things up a bit – the environments of the five areas DO feel different, to the game’s credit – but I think I spent too much time in each area for my liking by the time I beat the game and maxed out all the environments. The game does have a story, and the story is reasonably interesting; if you are paying attention you can likely figure out what exactly is going on, but it actually gives an in-universe explanation of why things work the way they do and why it is that all the Pokemon are suddenly coming back as you go around restoring the environment. It’s a cute little thing that the game did, and I liked it well enough, though it isn’t anything super in-depth. The Pokémon are cute, especially Peakychu, and the game has a lot of cute moments in it here and there that really enhance the experience. Overall, the game has the major problem that it just does not respect your time. Gathering resources is tedious, but the worst thing is inventory management, which is unnecessarily awful. I spent an inordinate amount of time having to deal with inventory issues, which ****. TL; DR; Cute game, cute little plot, but way too long for what it is.