Pokemon Pokopia is Pokemon meets… what, exactly? It’s kind of Animal Crossing, kind of Dragon Quest Builders, kind of Minecraft, and kind of Viva Pinata. But it’s not really any of them. It’s not the best bits of them combined, but it’s also not a disastrous blob of their worst elements either. It’s not original, but it’s not copying anything. It’s just sort of there.
That’s my basic feeling towards Pokemon Pokopia. It exists. Parts of it are fun, parts of it are frustrating. Sometimes too much happens at once, sometimes it feels a little slow. It’s cute, but it’s shallow. It’s creative, but it’s fiddly. It’s fine. It’s a modern Pokemon game through and through. But the disappointing thing is that Pokemon spin-offs have been the stronger offerings over the past few years, with Pokemon Unite, New Pokemon Snap, and Pokemon Pocket all seeing some success by freeing Pokemon from its restrictive framework. Unfortunately, Pokemon Pokopia is afraid of this freedom.
Pokemon Pokopia’s Pokemon Lack Personality
This starts in the game’s initial framing. You play as a Pokemon trying to terraform the abandoned lands before you to encourage more Pokemon to return. It’s an interesting way to centre the Pokemon themselves rather than the trainers. But the ‘mon you play as is a Ditto who spends the vast majority of the game looking and acting like a human, and the overall quest involves discovering why the humans have left this place behind. It’s a colossal failure to commit to the bit.
It continues through the game’s personality, too. Your ‘professor’ for the game is Tangrowth, and I appreciate that it’s not one of the most popular and marketable Pokemon here, but one the game could have a bit more fun with. The fact Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander were the first three I discovered gave me a little pause that it would be falling back on old favorites, but after those three Pokopia throws a whole array at you, and that’s to be applauded.
My problem is, it doesn’t really matter who the Pokemon you find are. Or at least, none of them will change the currently held opinions you have about any given Pokemon. Seeing them in the real world is supposed to be a chance to engage with their personalities, but they all just toddle around happily, doing generic things like waving at each other or falling asleep. There’s no sense that these Pokemon actually live there, and you quickly notice that their empty soundbites are shared across dozens of Pokemon. Having a Legendary Pokemon tell you you’re throwing an awesome party is a bit like Cartman telling you he uses any pronouns. They just would not say that.
Where exactly these Pokemon come from, when they were not in the big open field previously but can suddenly be found hiding in tall grass when you plant it, is unclear. If I enjoyed the game more, I probably wouldn’t pick at this nit, however.
It comes back to this fear, and it’s something mainline games have, too. There’s a lack of confrontation, a falseness to everything. These Pokemon and their bland personalities belong to a world where your Pokemon rival is your best mate who picks the starter weak to yours and wants to help you achieve your dream through teamwork. Animal Crossing is a relatively chill time, but it works so well because it’s spiky. Villagers are mean and rude, which in turn gives you license to hit some over the head with nets. There’s no push and pull in Pokopia. It just exists.
Pokopia’s Building Mechanics Have Depth, But Don’t Feel Worth It
All this to say, I don’t think Pokemon Pokopia particularly nails the Pokemon side of things. But what about the Pokopia side, which I’m taking to mean the general mechanics? Those don’t suffer from the same problems, in that it’s hard to accuse them of being bland. These are deep systems with a lot of chance for customisation and committed players prepared to sink hundreds of hours in will find a sandbox that allows them near total freedom to construct what they want. However, that’s not without its issues.
A lot of Pokopia’s gameplay feels fiddly, and while you expect a degree of that in this genre, it can become a roadblock. I don’t particularly mind that I’m expected to grind for new resources in each area. That’s how these games work, and it’s in this depth that the sandbox for freedom comes to exist. Each new area also feels unique, yet tied to Pokemon’s general world building, so you do get that sense of exploration. But there’s so much back and forth.
A great deal of your time will be spent travelling from location to location, wondering which storage box you left a particular resource in. There is no centralized inventory from which to pull all of your owned items from the aether, but instead you must repeatedly construct small wooden boxes to keep a handful of items in, then manually search each box when you need to build something. You also can’t travel back to areas until you’ve built a house, which requires a lot of this ferrying back and forth to begin with.
And while each land gets a different aesthetic, the goal in each one is the same. Put some grass in a square, or in a square beneath a tree, or in a square behind a rock, and Pokemon appear. Do mostly basic quests around constructing a unique habitat, rinse and repeat. Worse is how much construction slows you down.
At one point, I had to gather Pokemon to build a Poke Center, and the game just asks you to fetch the nearest ones to the task. But simultaneously, I had to put up lights around town to progress another quest. I put up lights and lights and lights and lights and wonder what’s wrong. Turns out I need to speak to a specific Pokemon, hitherto unmentioned by the quest, so they alone can tell me it’s really bright now. That Pokemon was building the Poke Center, so I couldn’t speak to it until tomorrow.
Small buildings give you an exact time for construction to be completed, but large ones just say ‘tomorrow’, which feels oddly unspecific.
The blocky nature of the world allows for you to terraform as you wish, but it can make the game tedious, especially in the early stages when you can only water the world in a cross shape that must move each time, and seems beholden to the camera angle rather than giving you control. I have no doubt that people who love this game will construct elaborate masterpieces, but for people who think the game is only okay, even just putting up a fence will draw an eyeroll. You also can’t really control where you place things, even with the mouse control, and will find yourself settling for: good enough. That’s fitting for Pokemon Pokopia.
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. It’s Pokemon’s take on a bunch of other villager games it’s not quite as good at, but if you persevere there is a game waiting for you here. You just have to get the actual game over with first.
- Released
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March 5, 2026
- ESRB
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Everyone / Users Interact, In-Game Purchases
- Publisher(s)
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Nintendo, The Pokemon Company
- Deep building mechanics
- Good array of locations and items
- It has Pokemon
- Too bland and safe to make you feel much of anything
- Main quest is repetitive and often unnecessarily roadblocked
- It thinks having Pokemon is enough
