I played the crap out of Pokemon Pokopia for like a week straight. I unlocked Palette town just as fast as I possibly could. Then I started building various subterranean experiments. I went back to unlocking stuff and continued to play pretty heavily for another two weeks. I finished the main story line and then my play time tapered off pretty steeply. I've gone a few weeks now where I haven't managed to get the full stamp bonus. I've missed playing even a single day a week for a few weeks here and there.

The constant stream of new stuff to learn kept things interesting. Not knowing where the story was going added some nice flavor and lore in the background. I only had just enough resources to be able to try some things out, so there was more stuff I had wanted to try out with regard to what I could build.

There's a little bit of time-based gating that happens with regard to visiting different islands and that put a bit of a speed limit on visiting all the places as fast as possible. There's a similar speed bump in acquiring new recipes via the Pokecenter shop. But none of these were terribly annoying. There's a steady stream of Pokeballs containing recipes to be discovered that I pretty much ignored.

Everything is super abundant and resources are quickly gathered, so there's no need to play it in order to work towards an objective. With no speed limit there and no need to play for long to collect resources there's no long term objective that keeps me in the game working towards something where I might then have other ideas of things I'd want to do. With the story concluded and all the towns unlocked, there's just no game left to play in the end game. I'm not a completionist, so I don't really care if I collect all the Pokemon or all the recipes or all the artifacts. No plot remains, no obvious game goals are left, so it's just a sort of sandbox with nothing that needs to be done. The only things left are boring busywork.

For example:

• I didn't finish the artifact tableau (I don't know what that thing is called that's underground)

• I didn't put those massive ugly lifts in my Palette town

• I didn't collect all the artifacts

• I didn't finish building in the sky trash place

One thing the game excelled at was looking bright and cheery while introducing more and more ugliness. The dried up place was only dried up. Progressing the story turns it lush and green. The water town is full of garbage and there are utilities to fix, and a town to restore. The volcano area was probably most interesting because of the new skills and abilities unlocked there (learning about smelting and cooking, for example) and so that distracts from what little damage or bleakness existed there. It was fun to discover the museum and carve it back out of the land, too. I guess that are really deviates from the bleak topics. But then the sky town is discovered and wow, what a disgusting, filthy mess that place was. In contrast to the water town, where there's just some garbage that needs to be scrubbed to make it look nice again, the sky town features makeshift repairs by the resident builder Pokemon.

The sky town was repaired using literal garbage as a building block. The beach was quickly scrubbed clean, but the sky place was just a big pile of recycled shit that was cobbled together. These trash blocks were used all over the place in a faux steam-punk look that was completely out of place with the natural environment in the sky town. It just wasn't for me. So once I finished the main story, I stopped going back. I didn't even fully explore the area or level that Pokecenter beyond the bare minimum.

Overall it was fun for a while and had an interesting story. The timeline doesn't quite make sense with the lore that was going on and there's really no end game content to speak of, and it's (typical now for switch games, really) overpriced. It was fun for a while and the multiplayer was absolutely rock solid in performance without any stupid hurdles or pointless nonsense like Minecraft has to make it work. But there's also no continuing source of conflict to keep it interesting and once you've settled areas, there's nowhere left to go.

Tags: index

created: 2026-06-02

(re)generated: 2026-07-17