Game Freak handed the Dragon Quest Builders team the keys and came back with the most inventive Pokémon game in years.
I hadn't finished a Pokémon game since Legends Arceus, and I bought this one on the strength of a single screenshot somebody posted of a pond. Pokopia starts from a strange premise and never once feels obligated to explain it, because you're a Ditto, alone, wearing the shape of a trainer who vanished somewhere in a stretch of ruined land. There's no starter to pick, no gym badges and no balls to throw, and the job you're handed is smaller and stranger than any of that: make the place livable again, one habitat at a time, and see who shows up.
The evening that hooked me was the one I spent on a garden. I'd befriended a Bulbasaur by then, whose Leafage grows grass wherever you point it, so I laid out a meadow next to a pond I'd filled with Water Gun, moved some stones around, second-guessed the stones, and moved them back where they'd started, with no quest anywhere in the game having asked for a bit of it. Then a Bulbasaur wandered in from somewhere off the edge of the plot, sniffed around for a while, and decided that it lived there now. I've sat through hundreds of capture animations across twenty-five years of these games and not one of them landed the way that did, because nothing was caught and nothing was thrown, the place I'd made was simply good enough that something wanted to stay in it.
“A Bulbasaur wandering into a garden I'd built felt better than most capture animations I've sat through in a mainline game.”
Moves come from Pokémon you befriend, and every one of them doubles as a construction tool. Rock Smash clears boulders into open plots, Cut fells trees into lumber, and transforming into a Lapras gets you across open water. Moves level up through building rather than battling, and the light combat that does exist, fending corrupted Pokémon away from your habitats, is a simple action encounter that the game itself clearly treats as an interruption to the real work.
Game Freak built this with Omega Force, the Koei Tecmo team behind Dragon Quest Builders 2, and it shows in how much the terraforming behaves like a toy rather than a menu.
Somewhere around the fourth region the loop shows its seams, with the same debris cleared using the same moves for yet another new area, and the middle stretch leans on repetition in a way the opening hours never do, and co-op is what saved that stretch for me. A friend on your island splits the labor, so one of you terraforms a hillside while the other fusses over a plot that was finished hours ago, and watching somebody else's Ditto waddle through a space you made together is worth the whole feature on its own.
The ruins do quiet storytelling as well, through faded signposts and abandoned trainer gear and the husk of an old Pokémon Center sitting out in a field. Nobody explains what emptied the Wilds, and piecing that together runs alongside the building as its own slow reward, which I found more compelling than most of the plots this series has written on purpose.
I've believed for years that this franchise's battling had become its least interesting part, and Pokopia is the first time anybody at The Pokémon Company has seemed to agree with me. Cutting catching and combat, the two pillars the whole thing was built on, and landing on the best-feeling Pokémon game since Legends Arceus is a lesson I hope somebody in Tokyo is writing down. I couldn't work out whether the Pokémon that move in are picked by habitat rules or partly at random, because two nearly identical plots on my island drew completely different residents and nothing in the game explains why. My save file says ninety hours and most of them definately went on gardening.