In general, a lot of people have asked for my thoughts on the game and “overwhelming” is still ringing true to this moment. I don’t know when it may stop feeling overwhelming, if ever, but if so, it hasn’t for me at least. I don’t think that will necessarily be accurate for everyone though– anyone who is well-versed in games with similar crafting aspects (such as Minecraft and Dragon Quest Builders) and enjoys being more flexible with a world they can decorate will likely have an easier time. That said, I’m not the type of player who enjoys those types of building experiences which is part of the overwhelming feeling I tend to have while playing. I also mentioned as much with Animal Crossing that I do not enjoy flattening things down and building up— building upon what already exists is most comfortable for me which also became kind of difficult in some areas which I’ll expand on later. Similarly, people who are also used to games like Factorio and others with large automation systems will have a much easier time than I am as I ruin my entire town trying to keep things working.
That said, while I have a lot of enjoyment from playing because I love spending time with Pokemon and it’s why I was excited about the game from the first trailer, there is also an underlying sadness to the game that is rather hard to ignore and so sometimes I can just feel really sad even while having fun.
Regardless, I wanted to wait to write this post until I finished the following goals:
-Complete the story
-Get max rank in each best
-Complete my Pokedex
And I finally managed to do all of those.
If you’re wondering why “SquishyJen”, it’s because I name my first Ditto in every game “Squishy” but then that would come up if I play with friends and they would be like “Who is Squishy??” so I added the “Jen” part to make it obvious, but it sure made things a bit awkward for reasons I’ll get to. That said, I suppose it kind of works if you think Squishy gets called that every time it tried to mimic their trainer, but since my Pokemon OC’s name is Celina, I guess it’d be Squishlina then…
That said, it’s hard to really talk about all my feelings without going into spoiler territory so everything passed this sentence and the screenshot below (showing probably the only area I really decorated fully to my own aesthetics) will go into detailed spoiler territory of the story, mechanics, and various other parts of the game.
The short version though is that if you love seeing Pokemon interact and that is enough for you, then I think the game is worth it. But if you get overwhelmed easily and/or don’t really enjoy crafting and that kind of building, maybe try it or see someone else play first to see how you feel. Hanging out with Pokemon was enough for me to not regret getting this game (and filled the void I had where Legends Z-A really disappointed me with the only positive being Mega Audino’s return), but it doesn’t fix how overwhelming it is for me and how unlikely it is for me to actually do everything build-related I may have wanted. In the future, I may just play it for events unless something is changed with how Cloud Islands work.
If I had to say the one thing that DID worry me from the initial aesthetics of the game, it was the timeline. I don’t like sad stories. I don’t like apocalyptic stories. Post-apocalyptic games are not my jam in any way, shape, or form and Pokopia really toes the line on that. Anytime I thought about it too much or my mind started wandering on the hows and whys, I would get overwhelmingly sad, practically drowning out the enjoyment and I still am not sure why they went this direction. Why couldn’t it just be a Ditto who wanted to help their trainer who has a cold or something with their job at a new Nature Reserve? Literally does all the plot things without the overly traumatic “where are the humans I don’t understand” issue beyond that “they can’t be here right now” versus them missing altogether.
But because we have to be in depressing lore central, we get details of the situation slowly through various lore drops we can find, the biggest ones being diary entries from a Hacker, a Professor, “Someone” (Ditto’s Trainer), and a Team Rocket Grunt.
The Hacker kicks it off a bit explaining how they stumbled upon a high security system filled with weather data. Curious why weather data of all things would be locked behind such high security, they figured it out and learned that a region had been hit by dozens of huge, repeated hurricanes that had been kept under wraps from the news by a foundation that worked on Pokemon conservation efforts. After learning all this, they awoke the next day surrounded by members of this foundation. The hacker accidentally left traces behind which let them find them and the Foundation openly explained in detail what was happening saying how these disasters would spread throughout the entire world and that humanity can’t prevent in its current state.
The foundation alongside other regions would be evacuating humanity into space while Pokemon would be stored and protected in a massive computer system. The Hacker ended up offering their services to help. Meanwhile, whenever anyone found out about the situation before it was publicly revealed, they were brought to a “safe place”. As the hacker worked on the computer system for the Pokemon, they found a flaw– A computer system cannot be kept running forever. The foundation hoped to send a few people back to the planet regularly to do maintenance on the computer system. Unfortunately, the energy allotment is very tight, and any deviations could lead to not having enough energy to return and the system to not be maintained which would lead to it no longer functioning.
Thus, the hacker put in a safety clause. If maintenance is not performed for a long amount of time and the system seems like it will lose function soon, Pokemon will be released in areas with weather safest for them and this is what leads to Ditto popping up along with other Pokemon releasing.
As for Professor Tangrowth, we learn in the Professor’s Diary that they essentially found a young Tangela after researching on Cinnabar. They used a potion to heal him and Tangela liked them so much, they brought him home thinking the Tangela would make a good friend for their grandchild. Tangela not only makes a good friend to their grandchild but was very interested in items used by humans.
We then get to learning about the natural disasters and how there won’t be enough food and water for humans thus the evacuation to space and why most Pokemon will be put into a computer system. When it gets time for Tangela and the Professor to part, they handed off Tangela to another member of the team to wait until their grandchild was asleep to lessen them being upset, but when the Professor went back to get Tangela, apparently, he had run off. We don’t really have details for WHY he ran off– Professor Tangrowth himself doesn’t really mention much about it either. Regardless, the Professor’s theory is he was trying to hurry home. Due to Tangela missing though, the Professor joins the survey team in hopes to find him during one of his visits which clearly doesn’t happen.
This one probably brings up the most questions. Why did Professor Tangrowth run off when he was generally good with humans? Where exactly were they looking and he was hiding that they kept missing each other? Is Professor Tangrowth’s house just somewhere he found safe or possibly near the Professor’s original home? Unfortunately, with most of the focus on the situation with the world and humans, we don’t really get much information about the Pokemon themselves beyond that the computer system was likely set up to feel like an actual world (Also something that generally was kind of hinted how the PC works and Pokeballs being more than just some tiny space) as many of them mention how they were somewhere nice and safe before suddenly appearing back in reality due to the Hacker’s programming.
Going back to Professor Tangrowth, I would guess he evolved from finding an Ancient Power TM which I would be unsurprised if it wasn’t the one attached to the vine sticking up on his head. We’re never given a set timeline beyond that it has probably been at least decades and slowly learning that this is, in fact, Kanto with the “Withered Wastelands” actually being the remains of Fuchsia City. While only being hinted in Fuchsia due to mentions of Koga and the Ninja Clan, it’s confirmed after finishing the “Sparkling Skylands” storyline which is very clearly Saffron City due to rebuilding Silph Co., though it also seems to have some of Celadon City as well but considering it’s floating in the sky and they were very close to each other, it’s not super surprising. General directions of cities in Kanto can also hint to this, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
The letters from Ditto’s trainer essentially talk about taking one last tour around before having to head to space and writing down things about Ditto and how they hope to reunite to travel the world. The letters from the member of “Team R” talk about how their new boss is great (as Giovanni had stepped down, that said, the way they say it makes it feel like this isn’t as long after Red/Blue/Green and Gold/Silver as it seems) and how they wanted others to see how good things could be. Their new Boss said that the plan is full of flaws and they won’t have enough energy to get back so they have a plan to help. The Grunt finds it a lot of work so they make up a plan to get others to help contribute which is the Team Initiation Challenges that are found on the beach. Completing all eight gets you a set of counterfeit badges and leads to the credits after a Rocket is launched into Space, which is what Team Rocket’s plan was, and after a very long sequence, actually makes it safely to the humans which I would guess is supposed to give them fuel to get home. Our included photo is also heavily hinted to be found by Ditto’s trainer.
When will the humans get back? Who knows. Time in space vs time in the real world are very different, exactly when and how long it’s been is incredibly vague, and considering that rocket had to fly pretty far out into space, it may be a long while before we see them and to be honest, I really want that epilogue of the humans coming back and yet it’ll probably never happen because they won’t know how to explain it (Hey, here’s how to explain it: They work together with Pokemon to finish rebuilding everything) and it would be additional models or be weird if there are still no humans (just say they are getting re-acclimated with Earth), but because of that, despite being a technically happy ending, it still left me unfulfilled and that sadness didn’t fully go away.
I know some people will bring up the whole “but Pokemon aren’t fighting here and trainers would make them fight and”– let me stop you right there. Ignoring that some Pokemon DO truly enjoy battling which you do see in some of the dialogue here, something that has been true in various parts of Pokemon, especially the Anime which literally had an episode of everyone’s Pokemon working with Team Rocket’s when they got separated from them, is that if there is something bigger at stake then Pokemon know how to put their differences aside and help one another. In this case: Trying to find what happened to the human’s and fix up this world that has been damaged to such a state.
After finishing up in the first area, you have two options– going to the West takes you to Rocky Ridges while going to the East takes you to Bleak Beach. I feel like I’ve seen more people go East first, but honestly, I’m incredibly relieved I went West first instead.
Going West made me continue to try and figure things out. While there was a museum there, I still hadn’t been completely convinced yet that this may really be Pewter City and areas around it. One interesting choice is that each city essentially had something different happen– Fuchsia was hit heavily with a drought, Pewter was hit by a Volcano and Earthquakes, Vermilion (Bleak Beach) was hit with flooding, and Saffron and Celadon suddenly rose into the sky somehow???
In general, besides my confusion with the timeline, the other thing that really gets me is HOW did this happen? We’ve been shown so often how Legendary Pokemon seem to affect the weather so was this some new set of Pokemon? How did this happen? If it was Pokemon, why did they do it? But they said it was just a natural reaction with no explanation for what caused it. And this goes back to what I said at the start where we didn’t NEED this to be a post-apocalyptic storyline. In Scarlet & Violet, we literally do have this giant dome with different areas for Pokemon. Having some big new park that also had a floating area would not be that weird!! Why does it have to be dark and depressing!!!
Going back to my point of going west first, I found Rocky Ridge so much less overwhelming than Bleak Beach with literally the only positive I can give the latter to be headed to first is because of a few big mechanics:
-Being able to make my own waterfalls and pools of water.
-Better ways to earn iron. You need SO MUCH iron in Rocky Ridges and I was struggling for a long while before heading to Bleak Beach.
-The Electricity system is used a lot.
Of course, Rocky Ridges does have its own pros as well and one of the biggest things it brings is the cooking system. That said, I hate the cooking system. Okay, maybe that comes off a bit strong as it’s not so much the cooking system I hate so much as the mechanics of the food itself.
The cooking is thankfully fairly simple, working just like a crafting table, but for, well, food. You do need various different cooking tools (A cutting board, frying pan, pot, and oven) for everything, but the cooking itself is simple enough and you’ll likely have crops planted anyway for some habitats. The problem is, and this is something I hate in general with games so it’s not a Pokopia exclusive thing, you need to eat certain meals for ability upgrades. I hate temporary power-ups. It’s why I don’t enjoy rogue-lites or MOBAs or Vampire Survivor-esque clones among other things. Having to constantly eat this food to re-power-up certain things really sucks. I already have to keep eating to refill my PP, but now I also need to eat to power up abilities as well.
You do eventually get a transformation that renders one of the most used food upgrades useless which I’ll talk about later, but it’s still an annoying system and I wish it was just a one-time thing, and food could just be quick PP refills without also being needed for doing certain things.
Rocky Ridge in general feels pretty simple with the most difficult parts being navigating the tunnels and volcano. The museum also has a few secret areas as well. This area is also where you meet Chef Dente and DJ Rotom. If you’re wondering about Chef Dente’s trainer, beyond knowing she came from a family of foodies who owned a restaurant and that her trainer called her Charlotte, we don’t learn much about them unfortunately.
Each area requires you to complete a specific goal and get the Environment level to 5 to move on (though, you can do Rocky Ridge and Bleak Beach at the same time). Withered Wasteland required getting enough humidity in the air to help make it rain. Rocky Ridge required enough “hype” to make a festive party and inspire Chef Dente’s grand party dish. These also result in a legendary Pokemon showing up.
After getting done with Rocky Ridge finally, I headed over to Bleak Beach which I hadn’t realized I could open right away, and this was where my jaw fully dropped. There was no mistaking the water canals and S.S. Anne. This was Vermillion City and it was heartbreaking. I think this was where it really just kind of broke me a bit. As much enjoyment as I had with Pokemon, the game was just leaving me so incredibly sad. And seeing this torn to shreds with broken walkways, ruined houses, and even the Pokemon Fan Club in such a sorry state was so incredibly overwhelming in a game that I already found overwhelming.
Looking through the ruined cabins of the S.S. Anne with things set up to celebrate a new voyage and new routes, trying to find your way around when it was just… all destroyed, cleaning up the various flooded canals… It was just really sad.
Adding to the sadness were the special Pokemon here: Mosslax and Peakychu. Mosslax was a Snorlax that helped take care of the town and in return, they would give them food. Unfortunately, as the natural disasters hit, humans were quickly running out of food and couldn’t give as much. Mosslax got into a fight and decided to take a nap to recover only to end up completely hibernating away in a cave with nobody finding them until we stumbled across them.
Peakychu also has a very confusing backstory due to being another of the Pokemon that “suddenly appeared” which would mean she should have been in the PC. However, the reason she became so pale is because she was giving her electricity to Pichu, Toxel, and Dedenne to keep them healthy as they were too young to generate electricity to the point where Peakychu is no longer able to generate electricity altogether. How did they get to this state? Was it an issue with the PC slowly going offline and it didn’t release them fast enough? That would be my only guess, but it’s just another depressing slap in the face of this area.
Bleak Beach’s quest involves generating enough electricity to light up the town to get Mosslax’s flowers to bloom and power the generator which Peakychu then uses to absorb electricity and let out a giant bolt to help get the town lit up.
It was then onto Sparkling Skyland and while this was probably my favorite “town quest”, this was my least favorite place to explore. With multiple floating fractured islands, it was just tiring to find my way, especially as someone with no sense of direction. Sparkling Skyland had you helping Tinkmaster, a Tinkaton who has built their hammer into a multi-tool, rebuild Silph Co. in hopes to bringing back the humans (and that is pretty much your constant goal– you’re helping make the environment better for Pokemon as well, but most of all you’re hoping everything will get the humans to take notice and return). This felt a lot easier than grinding up points in the other areas though and seeing the tower come back together was really satisfying.
In Withered Wasteland, we ran into Kyogre who helped fully bring rain back to Fuchsia. In Rocky Ridge, we met Volcanion who head the party and wanted to see what was going on. In Bleak Beach, we met Raikou who saw the giant bolt of lightning and wanted to check in. In Sparkling Skylands, we end up meeting Mewtwo who actually comes out of a master ball which means he was caught by someone in this timeline at least and confirms that yes, Withered Wasteland is in fact Fuchsia.
This essentially finishes the main story leaving just the “suspicious building” with the Team Initiation challenge left to do. Upon finishing this and seeing the credits, you get the Magnemite transformation which is incredibly handy between letting you float wherever, place multiple blocks at once, and easily break any block regardless of strength without constantly needing to upgrade Rock Smash. That said, Graveler with the upgraded Rock Smash is still the better option if you’re breaking A LOT of blocks in front of you. Magnemite also runs out of PP very quickly so you’ll need a lot of food as well.
There is one other area though– Palette Town which when I first read the name, my heart literally dropped to my stomach. Only after did I realize the spelling is different (Palette instead of Pallet), but I still didn’t have the heart to change the name. This area is kind of an open area for you to do whatever. Whether it is Pallet Town or not is unclear (though, it is to the West of Fuchsia…) and even if it is, it would be a mix of multiple places in that direction– not solely Pallet town. Besides some Pokemon being exclusive to the area (and some items only being earnable by completing certain challenges here), you can also find three very important building plans which let you meet Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres which are not just required for the Pokedex, but for Lugia as well in a nod to the first Pokemon movie.
Unfortunately, these buildings are huge. No matter where I tried to put them, I had to put down a bunch of blocks and break a bunch of blocks for an even layer for them to be built on and that doesn’t even take account of the number of different materials I needed and that 15 Pokemon, multiple of which needed specific skills, were required to build them. You also can only build one a day which I’d be less annoyed with if it still let me place the others in advance so I could map it out better -_-
Despite each Legendary Bird spawning in their respective building, they don’t actually live there so unless you try to turn it into something that counts as a home, you’ll need to move them somewhere else which also makes these giant buildings little more than a decoration and to be blunt, I only really like one of them. (I did try to make them a room in each to give some reason for them to still be there though).
Honestly, I don’t plan to do much in Palette Town. It’s another set of separated islands and I already moved most of my favorite Pokemon to the area I decorated in Withered Wasteland. It also just makes me sad to be there.
Not being a huge blocky-builder person, I do kind of prefer the pre-built houses. You’ll notice in the image I included near the top, I have a lovely pink Beach house, and I love it a lot. I would say my biggest issue though is despite the house being able to hold “four Pokemon” (five including Ditto), it’s actually two per floor which is such a strange choice to me. I set up both floors to be one big house– not separate apartments or some kind of dorm. If it was a concern with loading, just have it so only two Pokemon can show up on a floor at a time or something or even take into account how much space a Pokemon takes up, but having it so whoever lives on the first floor can never go to the second and vice versa is really sad.
If I ever do end up building a custom house out of blocks somewhere in the area (which, honestly, I don’t know if I can actually fit one but I guess we’ll see), it’d essentially be the same thing as what I had, but probably less cute on the outside and just so they can actually fully interact with the entire house and not just one floor.
In all honesty, I don’t even know if I want to play more. I do like seeing the Pokemon hang out and interact, but as mentioned, it still makes me sad too. All the questions, all the doubt, and the things left hanging and likely to stay unresolved really nags at me and it’s something that can actually drag stuff down for me quite a bit. Clearly they do have more Pokemon events planned so I will likely still pop on for those, but for everything I love about Pokopia, there is still a lot that makes me really sad too.
Moving away from the story though, let’s talk about the actual game mechanics. I don’t like crafting; I find this type of building really slow and tiring (which is why I never really got into Minecraft and had mixed feelings on terraforming in ACNH), and so I already knew I would have to deal with a lot to hang out with Pokemon like I was excited for. In all honesty, the crafting itself isn’t terrible. While it has my usual issues (too many things you need with inventory and storage limits), you will end up with a giant inventory eventually that makes it, so you don’t necessarily need everything in storage, but from an organization standpoint still drives me a bit crazy.
My issues are more with how you earn the recipes. While some are gotten through getting everywhere ranked up (the maximum rank is level 10), most are randomly gotten through your daily store stock or random water ripples and that is such an infuriating way to deal with RNG. There are items I’d love to get but have not gotten the recipe for and while there is a slight workaround to it, it comes with its own frustrations: Multiplayer.
Ignoring that you need Nintendo Online for it which means if you don’t have that, you’re just stuck with the recipe RNG which really sucks, there are essentially three different ways to do Multiplayer:
-Standard Link Play. You meet up on each other’s Palette Town. They can either just visit or play around in the area and help build with you. This is the most standard mode.
-Cloud Island Spectator mode. Think Dream Islands in Animal Crossing.
-Cloud Island Link Play mode. Think of this like an open Minecraft server, but only three players in addition to the owner can be on at a time.
What each has in common is the special Camera mode that allows you to take photos of items to 3D Print back at a Pokemon Center. That is the only way to get items you don’t have because you can’t actually give each other anything. It also really sucks for me as someone who likes to complete Collections but doesn’t have an interest in every single item. The only thing you can really share is Pokemon if you happened to have 99 Stardust to make into a Star Piece which you can give to a Pokemon on someone else’s island which if they like it, they will give you a gift that lets you spawn that Pokemon in your own island. The other option is to have a Pokemon with the Rarify ability, such as Porygon2, and they can turn it into Rare Pokemetal which is one of the most annoying materials to earn in the game and also used quite a lot to print many of the items you probably want anyway.
Essentially, Pokemetal Blocks can randomly give you a Rare Pokemetal Ore instead which can be turned into Rare Pokemetal, otherwise you just get normal Pokemetal. It’s yet another annoying RNG thing just to make things more grindy and after running out a few places in the world, you solely need to rely on Dream Islands to get more.
Dream Islands are islands you can go to one a day by interacting with a plushie outside once you’ve unlocked Drifloon. The caveat with Dream Islands (as they can help you get a lot more of certain materials is you can only go to one a day. Between the limits in the actual world for various ores and that you can only get event materials and Stardust on Dream Islands, the limit is incredibly frustrating.
It also gets worse when you realize that four Pokemon are only gotten randomly through these Dream Islands:
-Suicune randomly can show up on an Island from an Eevee Doll*
-Raikou randomly can show up on an Island from a Pikachu Doll*
-Entei randomly can show up on an Island from an Arcanine Doll*
-Ho-Oh, similar to Lugia, can only be gotten after recruiting the three Legendary Dogs.
* You technically have a random change from the Ditto and Substitute Dolls as they can randomly go to any island, but that just adds to the random factor
Ho-Oh and Lugia require crafting their respective Bells, a recipe you earn from befriending the three Legendary Dogs and three Legendary Birds respectively and ringing those bells when they are flying over. Honestly, for the most part, I think this is really cute and a nice nod to the series, but:
-You need 5 of their feathers and 5 Rare Pokemetal Ingots to craft them. Having been trading my feathers in for stuff from Gimmighoul and Gholdengo, needing to regrind feathers wasn’t fun… And of course they need the rarest ore.
-Even though Magnemite can literally fly up to them and be right in their face, the game will not let them acknowledge you or let you talk to them. Considering Magnemite is an end-game thing in the first place, it actually felt super weird they didn’t let people do this if they did reach end-game. I would’ve crafted the bells anyway– they’re pretty, but it felt super weird to just be completely ignored and treated like an obstacle, especially when the game frequently had alternate dialogue if you did something before a Pokemon asked you to do it.
Unlike the Birds and Dogs, Ho-Oh and Lugia work like Kyogre and Volcanion where you can not invite them to live with you, but you can say hi to them if you see them again. Well, most of them… I’m not sure if Volcanion ever shows up again. Considering everyone else can, I would think so, but Volcanion is the only one I haven’t run into again.
Mew is probably the legendary I was most excited to unlock as that felt fun because Mew shows up by completing the mural. As for Mewtwo, he works the same way as the Legendary Dogs– just random chance from a Dragonite (or Ditto/Substitute) Doll.
Finally, I haven’t really spoken about Cloud Island and it may be what left me the most disappointed and a large part of why a lot of my decoration motivation vanished (The other part being that I still haven’t gotten some recipes I would need to properly build back up certain areas) due to it being the equivalent of a Dream Island in Animal Crossing with how you view it– it’s essentially a “New Game+”. Cloud Island is a completely blank slate with the only thing carried over being your recipes and abilities. You need to re-find Pokemon, re-earn materials, and besides a Pokemon Center, nothing else exists.
And that… isn’t fun for me. If it was more like the Animal Crossing Slumber Island or Minecraft Creative mode, I’d still be a bit disappointed as someone who dislikes redoing things, but I’d likely still find a way to have fun with it. But having to redo everything? Sure, it’s a smaller round island with all biomes together, but I don’t want to build everything back up. I don’t want to refind all the materials and set up everything I worked so hard to set up.
Similarly, the only thing that can transfer between your main world and your Cloud Island are recipes so at least if you get a new one, it’ll be in both, but you essentially need to do everything in each and between my hatred of repeating stuff and crafting, I just can’t enjoy that. I don’t want to feel like I’m playing two different saves and that’s kind of what it will be when I have to do everything over.
Maybe one day I will feel up to it to try and do a big fancy build like I want to, but at least for the moment, I’m happy to finally take a break from the constant overwhelmingness I felt.