Pokémon Pokopia Review: Cozy Vibes, Cute Animals, and Creativity

Considering its genre and general Pokémon tone, Pokopia's story is mysterious and oddly dark. You play as a Ditto, the blob-like Pokémon that can transform into other Pokémon. You wake up in the middle of a wasteland, alone, confused, and missing your human trainer. You take a human form similar to your trainer’s and meet the only other Pokémon around, a Tangrowth that fancies itself a professor of humans. Together, you explore the wasteland, finding nothing but ruins with no Pokémon in sight. Professor Tangrowth speculates that restoring the land and making it habitable again will bring Pokémon back, and that humans will appear afterward. So that’s your mission: to restore a barren world.

Is this Pokémon's Left Behind? Pokémon's Apocalypse Hotel? A Pokémon Soul Blazer/Terranigma/Dark Cloud 1 or 2? Finding those answers requires a lot of terraforming, community building, furniture arranging, and making friends with many other Pokémon along the way.

To return life to the abandoned world of Pokopia, you must form habitats that will draw new Pokémon to the area. You then befriend the pocket monsters and fulfill their requests to create a welcoming space. Building some habitats is as simple as placing a few squares of tall grass next to each other, while others require decorations staged in a diorama. As for how many Pokémon are actually in the game, I found well over 100, and I know I haven't seen close to all of them.

Since you play as a Ditto, you learn how to perform the various Pokémon's utility abilities. Cut mows down plants, Splash waters the ground, Rock Smash destroys blocks, and so on. In fact, you're so full of utility that there's no room for fighting; Pokopia has zero combat, making this seemingly post-apocalyptic game fit solidly in the realm of a cozy life-sim.

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There's crafting, too, and dozens of resources that can be turned into hundreds of different objects for repairing and building up your environment. You start with a humble craft table and a handful of recipes, but that recipe list explodes as you find more materials and befriend Pokémon that can refine those materials into other materials. A fire Pokémon, for example, can turn clay into bricks and ore into ingots.

The land comprises Minecraft-like cubes of different types, such as soil, grass, stone, and sand. The building blocks are covered with various decorations, including flowers, trees, and countless discarded manmade objects. I appreciated the environmental variety across the sprawling zones, all in need of cleanup and repair. Every new place I visited introduced new resources and inspirations for environmental design, and I typically picked up a new move or skill in the process to expand my ability to affect the surroundings. This exploration is done from a cool, third-person perspective, so you can see your Ditto interact with other Pokémon.

The block-based environmental design, multiple zones, and emphasis on crafting and arranging objects to restore a ruined world make Pokopia very similar to Dragon Quest Builders and its sequel. There's a good reason for that: The first DQB was developed internally by Square Enix, but both DQB2 and Pokopia were developed by Koei Tecmo's Omega Force studio and share the same director, Takuto Edagawa.

That isn't a negative. Those games drew heavily on Minecraft's mechanics, with a big part of their appeal being their connection to the beloved Dragon Quest series. And you know what’s even more popular than Dragon Quest, with much more variety? Pokémon. It also helps that Pokopia feels distinct even with its DQB2 parallels, thanks to its lack of combat and bigger emphasis on resource management, environmental manipulation, and community building.

Your ability to change the block-based surroundings is surprisingly deep, but it can also feel slightly clunky at times. Generally, the Y button picks up objects; the A button lets you interact with objects, so you can craft benches and drop whatever object you're holding; X opens your inventory; left and right on the direction pad flips through your Pokémon moves; and ZR uses the selected move. This all works together so you can easily, for example, switch to Rock Smash, clear out a patch of blocks, pull a craft bench out of your inventory, set it down, and build some wooden walkways to lay out paths. The awkwardness shows up when you try to either be very precise in your building actions or change a large area at once.

You see, the blocks you affect depend on where you're standing and facing, and what you're specifically looking at with the third-party camera. Breaking or placing just one block in one location, especially if it's above or below you, requires wiggling the analog sticks to select the right one. It's a bit clunky. 

On the other extreme is turning dry, barren land lush and vibrant by watering it. Most of the time, that means using the Splash ability, which only impacts a plus-shaped area of five blocks. When a large part of the entire zone is dry, you must move and aim at specific squares to gradually water everything. Your watering capacity increases over time, but it's tedious early on.

These small frustrations in precision and scope are fairly minor. I quickly found myself getting used to them and developing the right rhythms to efficiently terraform my surroundings, especially as I unlocked new abilities. They felt like less and less of a nuisance as I got into exploring and remodeling the land to build Pokémon villages.

Speaking of villages, you'll rely on the Pokémon around you for more than just teaching you new moves. Each Pokémon has at least one specific skill, like Build, Burn, Cut, or Water. Those skills help you change the environment or refine resources: Pokemon with Burn can turn clay into bricks and metal ore into ingots, and Pokemon with Water can cover polluted blocks with soap so you can clean them off with your own water move. You can gather up to five other Pokémon at once to follow you around and help improve the world. 

Other Pokémon are needed to assemble building kits for certain structures you can't put together on your own, like cottages and windmills. Every structure has its own required resources, plus a list of needed Pokémon skills to put them together. Once you have everything arranged properly, you can ask the Pokémon to begin construction, which can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an entire day. A simple leaf den might need only a few leaves and sticks, and two Pokémon with Build and Grow to be ready by the time you finish your morning coffee. A gleaming Pokémon habitat monument might need huge piles of metal ingots, five Pokémon, and won’t be ready until the next day. That applies to restoring the Pokémon Center in each zone, too.

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Dens, cottages, and other residential buildings serve two useful purposes. First, they act as fast-travel anchors. You can place a Ditto flag on any house or structure you've built that has walls, a roof, and a door, and it will become your home in that zone. From then on, you can quickly warp there from anywhere in the game, saving the time spent traveling on foot. Second, they can serve as homes for other Pokémon once they've arrived at their own habitats. You can invite them to move into any residential structure with at least three pieces of furniture inside, including your own if you want a roommate. The benefit? You don’t need to rely on their own unique arrangement of random stuff to get them to stay in town. If a Pokémon's natural preferred space doesn't fit in with what you're to create, you can move them into a nicer home once they've arrived.

Pokémon Pokopia isn't an endless expanse like Minecraft, but it's still enormous, and its curated, well-designed spaces are satisfying to explore. The story takes you through several biomes, each huge in its own right. There's plenty to find off the beaten path and reasons to come back even after you've solved its biggest problems.

The game's quest-based structure introduces you to the tools you need to rearrange the world. As a result, you don't have many options in its early moments. That's by design, due to the many Pokémon, abilities, resources, and recipes to manage. Dumping everything at once would be overwhelming even to hard-core gamers like me, and the steady flow offers welcome time to learn the new mechanics.

Following Professor Tangrowth's instructions and speaking with the Pokémon you meet leads you through the story beats, but your progression is also measured by the PC next to the ruined Pokémon Centers in each area. Performing achievement-like tasks, such as gathering rocks, growing vegetables, or meeting a certain number of Pokémon, gives you coins to spend at the PC for items and recipes. The PC also measures the area's comfort level, which you holistically raise by clearing obstructions, placing decorations, and doing favors for the Pokémon that live there. Each time the comfort level increases, the PC increases its challenges. It nicely incentivizes you to go out of your way to improve the environment and help your neighbors even after the area is "done."

Outside the story, you have your own zone to build however you want. It's a big, open area with many environments but few human ruins to navigate or big obstacles to tackle. You can play around however you want, and it's a nice place to be creative outside the much more deliberate, curated story zones.

In addition to Minecraft and Dragon Quest Builders, Pokémon Pokopia has some strong similarities to Animal Crossing. The Pokémon you attract act like neighbors in your Animal Crossing island or town, with their own personalities and tastes. You can give them gifts and make their homes more comfortable, and in return they’ll like you more and give you gifts as well. They talk and play with each other, too, and communities feel lively with their presence.

I'm more drawn to the building and crafting aspects of cozy games like this than to the social mechanics. Still, I enjoyed the cheeriness of gathering Pokémon in the town I built. There's little room for drama when most Pokémon start off liking you and only like you more as you improve their homes and give them gifts, but that's the case for Animal Crossing, too. Everyone's friends, everything's fun, it's just a nice experience.

I will say that the broad friendliness of Pokémon, the lack of any sort of combat, the absence of humans, and the story's plot of restoring a ruined world add up to a hilariously incongruent, (probably) accidental message of radicalization: Maybe we humans are the problem, after all.

The other similarity to Animal Crossing is the real-time day-night cycle. During the real-world daylight hours, it will be daytime in the game. During the real-world night, it will be nighttime. There aren't many differences between the times of day, but some Pokémon only appear at their habitats during the night, while others are sleeping. It wasn't much of an issue in my playthrough, and I didn't run into any plot roadblocks where I needed to wait until nightfall to meet a Pokémon that would teach me a necessary move.

Pokémon Pokopia looks good but not amazing, which is true of nearly every major Nintendo game. Like Donkey Kong and Mario, it uses a bright, colorful aesthetic and a distinct visual style with little emphasis on photorealistic details. Pokémon Pokopia is graphically friendly and pleasant.

Pokémon Pokopia performs well on Switch 2. The frame rate is close to 60fps when the system is connected to a TV and closer to 30fps in handheld mode. There's little stuttering or hiccups, even when the screen is filled with objects and Pokémon. The draw distance is reasonably far, though details drop past a moderate distance (land masses viewed from across the zone will show only their blocky contours under a color-dampening fog layer). Most of the time, though, everything looks vibrant and runs smoothly.

In a nice touch, you can invite friends to see your carefully crafted Pokémon society through local wireless or online multiplayer. Even if they don't own Pokémon Pokopia, they can still view your creations using GameShare. However, I was unable to test these features before the game's launch.