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Pokémon Pokopia (Switch 2) Review
Image Credit: Nintendo
Loading...Pokémon Pokopia’s premise immediately caught my attention. Rebuilding a world and befriending Pokémon to continue the rebuilding quest sounded right up my alley.
And, after spending time in the ruins of Fuchsia City, I can confidently say Pokopia lived up to everything I hoped for from this title and more.
The game drops you in as a Ditto in a humanoid form somewhat resembling its trainer, complete with the Ditto face. After shortly meeting Tangrowth (this game’s version of a professor), you quickly get started with meeting the Kanto starter Pokémon and learning their skills.
That’s right, instead of transforming entirely into the Pokémon you need an ability from, you just transform the body part(s) needed to use the ability. Throughout the game, you’ll be able to water dry ground with Water Gun, grow grass with Leafage, Surf across the water, break rocks with Rock Smash and more.
As you revitalize the world from its dilapidated state, you’ll soon start building habitats for the creatures to come back and call home. They start off simple (a few plots of tall grass, for instance), before becoming more complex for rarer Pokémon.
This kicks off the loop that’s at the crux of the game. Creating habitats to find new Pokémon, recruiting them, helping their requests to build larger habitats for them, finding new areas to build new habitats for, and rinse and repeat.
While performing this addicting little loop, you can have several of your friends follow you along to help gather and store items. You can also assign Pokémon out to several tasks around the areas, to help make new items or farm ingredients for you.
Additionally, as you progress further in the game, you do get the ability to invite friends in for some multiplayer fun. Up to 3 of your friends can join in to help build up the world and work to build habitats, as well as just explore and farm items you need to store for future use.
Speaking of storage, that probably would be the biggest “pain point” in this game. As you get further into the game, you just start collecting more and more items and storing in different boxes you build, as Ditto can only hold so much. However, these storage boxes aren’t interconnected, leading to a lot of recalling which boxes have what, or jumping around to find the right items you need.
I wouldn’t say this issue is huge, and by no way hampers what is a great game with a lot of personality. From the constant interactions with the creatures to the mannerisms that Ditto shows, the game has a lot of life to show and never stops being enjoyable.
