The Pokémon Game We’ve Been Dreaming Of
Given the recent massive love for Pokémon experiences that simply let you watch these creatures hang out in different environments—New Pokémon Snap, Detective Pikachu, Pokémon GO, and even Pokémon Sleep—it’s genuinely astonishing that it took this long for Pokémon Pokopia to emerge. It brilliantly marries two concepts that probably should have been smashed together ages ago: life simulation games and Pokémon.
Koei Tecmo’s Omega Force was absolutely the right studio to snatch this idea up, too, after its proven success working on the excellent Dragon Quest Builders 2 with Square Enix and its ongoing positive reputation for Dynasty Warriors x Nintendo crossovers like Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors. Given all this pedigree, I came into Pokémon Pokopia having built up skyscraper-high hopes and expectations—and I’m thrilled to say it exuberantly met me at the top and then somehow kept climbing.
A Ditto Protagonist Is Genius
In Pokopia, you play as a Ditto that has transformed into the roughly human shape of their former trainer, who is now mysteriously missing. Ditto is released unexpectedly into a Kanto region that looks… quite different from what you might remember in other games or the anime. You start in the ruins of what you’ll very quickly recognize as Fuchsia City, but now drought-stricken and with buildings reduced to rubble. A friendly Tangrowth posing as a Pokémon professor is there to greet you, and together the two of you undertake a sprawling 40+ hour effort to restore the region to its former glory in hopes of attracting both people and Pokémon back home.
This turns out to be a pretty compelling premise on multiple levels—both in the intriguing mystery you’ll slowly uncover about what catastrophic event happened to the world, as well as in how that recovery effort ties intimately into your actual minute-to-minute gameplay tasks. Nothing here feels like busywork; every action serves the larger narrative of restoration and hope.
Shapeshifting Mechanics That Actually Matter
You’ll start by rebuilding natural Pokémon habitats, such as patches of tall grass or flowers which will in turn attract new wild Pokémon to come live within them. But eventually you’ll construct whole buildings, furniture pieces, and infrastructure as you build out a thriving little community from scratch. As a Ditto, you have the unique ability to Transform into other Pokémon, allowing you to use their signature abilities to restore the devastated land.
For instance, a Squirtle will teach you Water Gun early on, which allows you to water the parched dry ground and bring back dead trees, bushes, grass, and flowers in satisfying waves of green. From a Bulbasaur, Ditto learns Leafage, allowing them to raise up new tall grass from previously barren empty ground. Rock Smash breaks up rocks blocking your path, Cut chops up overgrown foliage, and so on in familiar fashion. Much later in your journey, you’ll be able to turn into a Lapras to Surf gracefully across water, and finally, a Dragonite will teach you to Fly (well, glide majestically) through the air.
The Joy of Being a Blob
This is where a tremendous amount of Pokopia‘s personality shines brightest, as it really goes all-in on reminding you that you are a Ditto—a blobby pink creature that can shapeshift into literally anything. Ditto gains a protective shell and Squirtle tail when it uses Water Gun, and sprouts green vine arms for Leafage. It can suck items into its inventory in bulk by slurping them up into its mouth, Kirby-style, effectively absorbing them until it needs to spit one back out again.
If you fall from a great height, never fear: you’re a Ditto! You just blop into a pink goo for a moment, then reform back into your human shape like nothing happened. One of the idle animations is just Ditto collapsing into its pink gooey self again and falling asleep standing up. There is so much delightful attention to detail in Pokopia’s animations and marriage of mechanics to character, and all these little touches combined to keep me completely locked into the universe and fantasy of being a Ditto dressed as a person, glooping about this ruined world trying to make it beautiful again. I didn’t really care about Ditto before, but after Pokopia? I absolutely love this adorable weirdo!
Pokémon With Actual Personalities
That impressive level of detail extends beautifully to your Pokémon friends, all of whom are given colorful personalities and plenty of activities to do once they settle into their new homes. You can give them gifts to raise their comfort levels and affection for Ditto, which will often result in them giving you thoughtful gifts themselves—creating a lovely cycle of generosity. They’ll invite you to play games together, such as Hide and Seek (a game that effectively turns into Prop Hunt once Ditto gains the “Camouflage” ability), or give you cute little quizzes testing your knowledge of Pokémon facts and trivia.
Pokémon will just have fun on their own initiative, too—you can watch them react enthusiastically to items you leave out in the world, play tag with one another, or even make friends with their neighbors and develop little relationships. It’s exactly the kind of passive Pokémon-watching experience that games like Snap proved we desperately want, but now you get to actively facilitate and encourage these interactions.
Each Pokémon also has different unique abilities that dictate how they interact with the world around them. You’ll frequently want to enlist Pokémon like Scyther to chop wood for you or Piplup to wash away sewage, which is a mostly-great way to highlight the strengths of Pokémon that don’t normally get much spotlight in mainline games. I say “mostly” because I was admittedly a bit irritated later on by how much trekking back and forth between areas I had to do to figure out which Pokémon I’d left all my iron ore with or who was currently converting my clay into bricks. But largely it was a positive that almost every Pokémon had a genuinely cool and useful purpose beyond just being cute companions.
Between all that functional utility and the presence of a surprisingly robust Pokédex (that was significantly larger than I expected), I found myself very motivated to design increasingly complex habitats to attract rarer and rarer monsters in hopes of filling out every last entry and seeing what new creatures would show up.
The Little Details That Impress
One other small technical detail I wanted to specifically call out was how impressively good “pathing” is in Pokopia. I’ve played literally tons of games that involve escort quests or mechanics where you need to get someone to follow your character somewhere, but they constantly get frustratingly stuck on the terrain or obstacles. Pokopia’s pathing is genuinely great. If Ditto can find a path somewhere, whoever is following them almost always can too without any issues whatsoever.
This even extends to complex mechanisms such as elevators and sky lifts, the latter of which actually show the Pokémon following you (cleverly, up to five at a time) climbing aboard subsequent lifts and riding across a gap with you in an adorable procession. You’ll be asking a lot of monsters to follow you around in Pokopia, so it was really nice to be consistently impressed with how well this seemingly simple mechanic just… worked perfectly every time.
The Addictive Loop of Restoration
As more and more Pokémon return to the world, they’ll start to want more than just a patch of grass to lounge in—they’ve got needs and preferences! On a simple stroll through the area, Charmander stops me to tell me he thinks it’s too wet and damp around here, and wants a drier, ideally fiery spot to hang out. I’m off to build him a campfire, only to be immediately accosted by Squirtle, who would like to move someplace close to a water source. Bulbasaur shows up to tell me he thinks his grass patch is too dim and shaded, and could stand to be better lit up.
I see a spot that would benefit from a table and chair, so I get distracted gathering materials for that furniture, and then Drifloon shows up wanting a doll for some mysterious reason, and oh that empty spot right there would be perfect for a small hut, let me just make some more bricks and… wait, is that block over there glowing? Pokopia is fundamentally a game of little chores, and every single one of those chores provides a genuinely satisfactory dopamine rush as you watch a new building appear or a patch of previously barren landscape fill out with cute creatures doing adorable activities. The loop was so engrossing that I did not once mind the complete absence of any combat—something present in Dragon Quest Builders but (for pretty obvious story reasons) is not a part of Pokopia. It doesn’t need it at all.
Minor Storage Frustrations
One minor issue that tripped me up somewhat, however, was the storage system in Pokopia. Ditto has a personal inventory that can be expanded over time, and you can also construct storage boxes both small and large to put more items in as you accumulate resources. This works perfectly fine for a while, but because there’s no unified storage system, by the end of Pokopia I was having trouble remembering what box in what region I had put that certain item I now needed.
Frequently when a quest called for something specific I had to fast travel between multiple regions, sit through multiple loading screens, then manually look through multiple boxes just to find that one material. I completely understand wanting to limit storage during Pokopia‘s story mode so that you don’t haul enormous quantities of resources from place to place and are instead forced to use each new environment’s materials to solve your problems locally. But the post-game content really, really needed some sort of unified, interconnected storage box system between all the regions into which I can dump 20 stacks of 99 sand or stone without losing my mind trying to find them later.
Building Mechanics With Room for Improvement
As Pokopia progresses, the dozens of little chores slowly evolve into bigger, more grandiose building projects. There are four main story regions to explore and reconstruct, each with dramatically different habitats, monsters, and aesthetic themes to build around. Pokopia‘s actual construction mechanics will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s played these cube-based building games before like Minecraft or Dragon Quest Builders. You break up the blocks of the environment, collect them in your inventory, craft other blocks out of gathered resources, then stack cubes, make structures, and fill them with decorative items and furniture.
I unfortunately suspect that savvier builders than myself may not be thrilled by the building controls and interface. I frequently found it somewhat difficult to position blocks exactly where I wanted them due to frustrating limitations on where and how I could move them, as well as a troublesome camera when working in smaller enclosed spaces. Other games (Animal Crossing: New Horizons being the prime example!) have already solved the problem of precise placement with more intuitive systems, and I genuinely wish Pokopia had followed their lead here instead of reinventing the wheel.
That said, the story regions of Pokopia have loads of ruined building foundations and other helpful “suggestions” of spaces that you could start from as templates, or you can tear it all down and begin completely anew if you prefer. It’s a healthy, enjoyable mix of freedom and guidance that satisfied both my desire to make anything I wanted creatively and the need, at times, to just get a functional house up and move on with the story.
Pre-Made Kits Save the Day
As someone who’s admittedly not great at making aesthetically pleasing spaces from scratch, I was incredibly grateful for the presence of building “kits” that, when filled with the required resources and assigned some worker Pokémon, would become attractive pre-made structures that actually looked nice and cohesive, allowing me to skip most large-scale manual construction if I chose to. And then there’s Palette Town, a bonus non-story region explicitly set aside for players to build completely from scratch with no guidance. It’s so absolutely massive I have no idea how to even begin turning it into a proper functioning metropolis. There’s enough open space to build huge, absurd sculptures like folks have been doing in Minecraft for over a decade, or get together with friends online and construct an entire Pokémon-filled world with multiple interconnected towns. I’m genuinely stoked to see what the real creative artists get up to in there over the coming months.
A Surprisingly Deep Story
One of the most surprising and wonderful elements of Pokopia is the actual story and worldbuilding. So much of my delight in Pokopia came from wandering through this ruined version of Kanto, collecting scattered notes and logs explaining what happened to the world and stumbling into locations that will be instantly recognizable to longtime Pokémon fans like me. Walking into a crumbling ruin and feeling the gut-punch as I realized where I was and what tragic event happened here really, really hit emotionally hard, and Pokopia‘s capitalization on that nostalgic feeling is absolutely pristine.
(I’d be remiss not to mention the excellent soundtrack as well, which sprinkles in familiar melodies from the original games in exactly the right dose, then twists those beloved tunes around in creative ways as a reminder that the world is not what it once was.) Fans familiar with the original Red/Blue/Yellow games or their FireRed/LeafGreen remakes might get substantially more emotional impact out of this than those who haven’t played them—but I genuinely think that the environmental storytelling, the slow drip of mysterious clues, and the poignant contrast between the tragic fate of this world and Pokopia‘s determinedly cheery tone should be able to hook even those with a less intimate knowledge of the setting’s history.
The Verdict: A Must-Play Pokémon Experience
Pokémon Pokopia is a real treat and easily one of the best Pokémon games in recent years: an enjoyable building and town simulator that capitalizes beautifully on the charming personalities of its monsters in a way that appeals to both the creative builder and the completionist collector alike. It’s packed with genuinely fun things to do and worthy rewards for doing them, and strikes a healthy balance between freedom and helpful suggestion in its building mechanics (despite a few precision nitpicks and storage frustrations).
All of this engaging gameplay is housed in an absolutely adorable adventure through an interesting and surprisingly deep setting that presses all the nostalgia buttons for longtime fans while remaining accessible to newcomers. And it all shines especially bright in its lovable protagonist Ditto’s blobby pink hands. If you’ve ever wanted a Pokémon game that lets you just hang out with these creatures while building a better world, Pokémon Pokopia is exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
Rating: 9.5/10
Have you played Pokémon Pokopia yet? What’s your favorite Pokémon to have as a helper, and what are you building in Palette Town? Have you figured out the full mystery of what happened to Kanto? Share your experiences, favorite Ditto transformations, and building tips in the comments below!
