My thoughts after completing the game and getting 297 of 300 Pokémon
Pokémon Pokopia is a cozy game. A blend between Animal Crossing and Minecraft, the central goal of the game is exploring a series of five large open levels, collecting materials and completing quests, in order to build “habitats” for Pokemon. Building these habitats allows Pokémon to return, letting you befriend them.
The game takes place in the ruins of a world abandoned by humans. You start out meeting Professor Tangrowth, who has been living in a cave and collecting human artifacts for a very long time, ever since the humans – and Pokemon – all disappeared. He hasn’t seen anyone else in a very, very long time.
You awaken as Professor Tangrowth messes around with an ancient Pokedex, which somehow brings Ditto out of a state of dormancy. Adopting an appearance reflective of your old trainer, Ditto joins Professor Tangrowth in a journey of trying to bring other Pokémon and humans back to the world.
Despite being a cozy game, it quickly becomes clear that this is a post-apocalyptic scenario – the humans are gone, their cities are in ruins, and the few Pokemon you meet are confused, all expressing that they’ve just woken up out of a long slumber and all the humans were gone. No one knows what is going on, and it is up to you to fix things.
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.
There are over 300 Pokemon to find in the game, and I found 297 during my time with the game before I finally decided to give up on it, as the last few Pokemon would have required me to do grindy, repetitive tasks to hope for good RNG.
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.
The problem is, this game does not respect your time and has serious QOL issues. You have limited (though expanding) inventory space, but worst of all, there’s no common shared storage space; you have to build a bunch of boxes to store your stuff in, and this quickly becomes incredibly tedious because you need to go back and FIND that stuff eventually, across five areas of the game and goodness knows how many boxes. I figured out a system for myself to keep track of materials fairly early on, and eventually color coded my boxes by their contents, but in the end, it was not enough and there were a number of times in the endgame where I had to go back and search through my old boxes in my old areas to find some random item I’d found previously so I could use it to complete a habitat. I spent far, far too much of my time playing this game on inventory management.
Gathering resources was also a chore, and it could sometimes take hours to properly gather them, especially on the once a day “dream islands”, which were dense with materials.
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.
TL; DR; Cute game, cute little plot, but way too long for what it is, and way too tedious and time-wastey due to poor QOL decisions.