Pokemon Pokopia is a video game where you play as a Ditto who takes the form of a human trainer as it attempts to rebuild a barren world where all the humans and Pokemon are nowhere to be found. The game asks you to water the cracked ground to bring life back to the land, to create habitats for Pokemon to flourish, and to rebuild the grand Kanto region so that the humans may one day return.
The time I’ve spent in Pokopia has truly healed something in me. Something I did not even know was in need of healing.
Let me take you back to March of the year 2020. COVID-19 was a thing. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was also a thing, and that quickly became everyone’s cozy pandemic game. Everyone was depressed, sure, but we coped by living out our island fantasy lives with cute animals (and some not-so-cute ones) and Tom Nook.
It was the first time I’d actually properly flexed my creative muscles. After hitting a five-star rating on my island, it was time to terraform the whole thing and shape it into my dream land. Hundreds of hours later, the island was complete. I was immensely proud of it, though my partner never passes up on the opportunity to tell me that my island will always be inferior to hers. I was also exhausted, and I never touched Animal Crossing again. I came to realize that I was simply not meant for a life of creativity. Ironic, I know, for someone who has chosen to pursue a passion in writing.
Pokopia, though, understands that, indeed, not everyone was cut out for creativity. It would be incredibly reductive to describe this game as Animal Crossing, but Pokemon, but in a nutshell, that kind of is what it is, with a dash of Minecraft and Dragon Quest Builders.
Pokopia plops you into the ruins of a town in the Kanto region. Unlike in Animal Crossing where the land was ripe for molding, Pokopia still houses the remnants of broken-down buildings and cracked roads. This, to me, is where it diverges the most from Animal Crossing. While it is entirely possible to reshape the whole of Kanto to your liking — Pokopia gives you an immense amount of freedom in this regard — its destroyed buildings and pathways also serve as blueprints for you to build from. So if you’re not particularly good at being creative and proper urban planning, you could just fix up the existing buildings and roads that have been laid out for you and go from there.
This doesn’t mean simply following an outline. You could reconstruct a building with different materials. Rebuild a Poke Mart and repurpose it into an entirely different shop or turn it into a house for a Pokemon. Open up the pathway to a hilltop picnic side but set up stalls there or turn it into another residential area. There are blueprints and guidelines to follow, but that’s all they are: guidelines. It’s enough to get you started, and once you do, you’re free to branch out however you want.
And I have to say, this has instantly made Pokopia — a game that can be extremely overwhelming with its sheer amount of content — feel much more approachable and simply whelming.
Knowing that all my efforts are going towards rebuilding the Kanto region has me overcome with serious nostalgia too. Having grown up with the original Pokemon games like so many other millennials, it’s been very lovely revisiting places like Palette Town (which can be customized however you like) and Vermillion City, which had me awestruck the very first time I set foot in there. The lo-fi, chill remixes of the original town tracks help too.
As I continued rebuilding and fixing up the towns, I found myself thinking, “Humans? Who needs humans when you’ve got Pokemon?” This may sound obvious to you, but it hit me then that Pokemon were really, y’know, the stars of the Pokemon games. I love creating new habitats, having a Pokemon spawn there, and knowing that they’re all counting on me — a little unassuming Ditto — to give them a comfy home.
There’s something utterly magical about the purity of these pocket monsters — except Drifloon, that creepy thing needs to get away from me — that makes Pokopia such a joy to play. As it turns out, the key to making a really good Pokemon game is ensuring that the essence of the Pokemon themselves is intact.
