Pokémon Sword & Shield

Yeah, this is an entire blog post dedicated to a pokémon game because, let’s face it, I’m no-one without pokémon in my life. It is the one true love. It used Attract on me when I was very young and I’ve been in love ever since. Alright, that got weird. All jokes aside, pokémon has indeed been an important part of my life growing up. I’ve played every single mainline game since Red & Blue on every iteration of Nintendo’s handhelds, and I never quite grew out of the mania despite most of my peers having dropped off in their early teens. I played Diamond & Pearl competitively to a level where I broke the worldwide top 300 leaderboard at one point. It was crazy.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours breeding pokémon from the right egg groups and hatching endless eggs to get the right pokémon with the right IVs, natures, abilities, and egg moves. I’ve EV-trained them to optimally maximize their stats, planned and put together movesets that synergized with my team composition and attained all the most useful hold items for competitive battling. Yeah, you could say I’m a little more into these games than the average player. Naturally, you can imagine how excited I was when the mainline series was about to make its big debut on the Nintendo Switch. I even wrote a massive Medium post about the end of the dual-screen era and the series’ shift to a proper console.

And Gen VIII is now out on the Switch in the form of Pokémon Sword and Shield. So…let’s get the Copperajah out of the room first before diving into the game. During its reveal, it was announced that the game would not include the full National Dex, which essentially meant that half of the entire pokémon roster so far would get culled from the game. Naturally, this caused a big outrage amongst longtime fans. They termed it #Dexit and caused a massive controversy swirling around the game in the months leading up to its release. Every pokémon game before this had the ability to transfer pokémon from previous games into the new ones, allowing players to keep their favorite pokémon and transfer entire battle teams over from game to game as the franchise evolved. Now, half the roster is gone and many of the pokémon are stuck in Pokémon Bank or Pokémon Home.

Making things worse is that Gamefreak announced that every pokémon game going forward would be like this: there would only be a limited selection of the existing pokémon available in every game. This essentially means that there won’t ever be a pokémon game again that has the full National Dex in it. Now, their reasons for such a change are even more ludicrous. Gamefreak mentioned that it was for game balance reasons as well as it being too time-intensive to create new models and animations for all 890 pokémon. But dataminers have proven that models and animations were re-used from the 3DS games. And they added tons of new models and animations anyway for the Dynamax / Gigantamax gimmick as well as the Pokémon Camp features in this generation, so they sort of…lied to the fanbase. And “game balance” is a terrible excuse. The game has never been balanced, period. We wouldn’t have Smogon making OU/Uber tiers if it was. Adding new pokémon wouldn’t unbalance the game in any way. This made a lot of the fanbase even angrier and a lot of them ultimately decided to boycott the game entirely.

Of course, none of that mattered. The vocal minority on the internet is but a tiny sliver of the players market. Pokémon Sword & Shield quickly became the fastest-selling Switch game of all time, selling over six million units in its first three days of launch. Players were understandably mixed about the game, and I myself was incredibly hesitant to buy it knowing that it would be lackluster compared to the previous entries. But I couldn’t resist. It was pokémon and I knew I needed to play it. I hadn’t seen any of the Gen VIII designs yet (they did a really good job keeping them under wraps), and I wanted to explore all the new pokémon with fresh eyes without knowing what their evolutions looked like and without going too deep into planning a team ahead of time. All I knew was that I was picking Sobble, as I always pick the Water starter (save for that one generation where I picked Rowlet).

So I played the game and completed the story after ~30 hours. And I enjoyed my time with it. Yes. Despite all my complaints and hesitation pre-release, I had a good time with the game. Most of the “good” parts of the game boils down to the fact that it’s…a pokémon game. The core long-term gameplay loop of catching pokémon and seeing them evolve with you on your journey through the game coupled with the short-term loop of battling, deciding type matchups, picking movesets, and countering opponents makes for an extremely addictive experience. It always has and it always will. Gen VIII added lots of interesting new type combinations of pokémon, gave many old pokémon new Galarian forms, added some more new moves, and gave some more simple new twists to the battle formula. All of this helps ensure that the old formula has just a little more spice & seasoning in it to still be fun, even after twenty years of the exact same thing.

And that’s both a good and a bad thing. See, even though it’s still fun to catch, train, evolve, and battle pokémon, the actual battle system has not evolved one bit. You still send out one pokémon, you still see the exact same text and battle animations, you still have to mash your way through pointless battles where the AI opponents do nonsensical things, there is no level of challenge whatsoever, and you can one-shot nearly every single pokémon in the game without even trying by simply overleveling yourself (which is incredibly easy thanks to the forced Exp. Share this time around).

The new gimmick this generation is “Dynamax” and”Gigantamax”, and I have to say, this is my least favorite one by far. Mega-evolutions actually had pokémon evolve into interesting designs of themselves, sometimes changing their typing. You could trigger it at any time at the cost of a held item, which made for some interesting battle strategies around which pokémon your opponent would mega-evolve (if any). Z-Moves were okay too, also allowing for the element of surprise with when your opponent would use it and forcing you to plan whether or not you could tank the hit or switch out just to be safe. With Dyanamax, the pokémon just…get bigger. And you can’t just do it anywhere. You can only do it in specific fights. And the only reason you even do it is because the opponent is about to Dynamax their last pokémon. When it’s a Dynamax vs Dynamax, it just plays out like a regular pokémon battle with the rock-paper-scissors type matchups. Sure, it looks epic but it’s relying far too much on the spectacle of it all to sell the gimmick rather than actually enhancing anything about the gameplay. I found myself deciding not to Dynamax towards the end of the game just so I wouldn’t have to sit through an unskippable twelve second animation of my pokémon getting larger in size.

And then there’s Gigantamax, a needless “enhancement” of Dynamax. These not only make the pokémon larger, but also change their form. While interesting in theory, it’s really silly that only specific pokémon can be “Gigantamax’d”. You have to have a special version of that pokémon to trigger its Gigantamax form, which is just…why? I never used a single Gigantamax pokémon in my run for this reason (you really don’t need to anyway). In fact, you can beat this entire game without ever needing to Dynamax or Gigantamax your pokémon, which is saying a lot about how much work they put into a useless gimmick. At least with mega-evolutions and Z-moves, you had to strategize around your opponent and when they would use it. Here, you always see it coming and you can always plan for it.

Ok, so how’s the game aside from the battles? Also meh. The Galar region is loosely based off of Britain, but the game world plays out like a bad caricature of the region instead of an inspired recreation. The towns this time around are very empty and sort of pointless. I noticed a lot more verticality and curved streets in the level design, but in terms of what you actually do in the cities, the past two generations of mainline games certainly offered far more. There are tons of buildings and houses you just can’t enter and barely any interesting NPCs to interact with. There’s a main city called Hammerlocke modeled after Edinburgh, the city where the championship is held called Wyndon modeled straight after London, and a stereotypical punk town called Spikemuth which is…just literally a random eurotrash alley.

The routes in the game also feel incredibly linear. Past games have at least had interconnected caverns, long winding paths, large fields, and open oceans to explore. This time around, you’ve barely stepped ten feet into a route and suddenly you’re entering the next town. It’s quite disappointing. The feature they sold hard about the game was the Wild Area. And it’s…a mixed bag. Overall, I’m quite positive on the idea conceptually, but quite negative on the execution. When I first saw this, I was expecting a Breath of the Wild-esque leap into open world pokémon. Tons of wild pokémon just running around waiting to be caught. But what we actually get is a little underwhelming, to say the least.

While you can see and catch lots of pokémon in the Wild Area, all the interesting things you want to catch are gated off because they’re a higher level than you’re “allowed” to catch. This is so silly. What’s even the point of running into a cool Steelix when you can’t even catch it? I think they should’ve allowed players to catch it if they managed to do it, but still had the pokémon disobey them or refuse to attack in battle until the correct level gate requirement had been cleared. Not allowing players to catch them discourages you from even exploring the Wild Area when you run into it for the first time.

On top of this, there are static spawns in specific parts of the Wild Area. It’s not as dynamic and freeform as you might think. It’s the same stuff in the same areas all the time. There’s not much of a point in going back to a part of the Wild Area if you’ve already caught everything there. The online mode is absolute garbage, with the game lagging and slowing down to a crawl when you’ve got friends with you exploring the Wild Area and attempting to do the max raid battles to catch Gigantamax pokémon and get rare items or moves from them. The online system in general is absurdly bad, even for Gamefreak. Connecting or trading with a friend is a nightmare, and they removed features that worked well like the GTS. Never will I understand.

So what else did I actually like about the game? Well, the soundtrack is a banger. The music is really good throughout the game. The gym leader theme in particular is a standout, with the techno beat going full swing after moments of tempered silence before the match begins all the way to the crowd starting to chant as both you and the gym leader pull out your Dynamax pokémon at the end. Bede’s theme and the legendary pokémon theme were also really big highlights for me.

I also appreciated all the quality-of-life improvements in the UI. You can finally sort your bag, you can access your pokémon boxes from anywhere, you can multi-select within boxes to move pokémon, you get helpful item descriptors when you pick up a new item for the first time, and all the interactions with trainers in-battle are quite cool. I also liked the customization options this time around and the plethora of accessibility options in the main settings menu.

But the story of the game was also a huge letdown. I did like the lighthearted take this time around. You’re not running around saving the world from disaster anymore, you’re just doing your own version of a FIFA Championship Cup while a corporate capitalist tries to exploit the natural resources of the land for power generation. Seriously, that’s the plot. They did a pretty good job hyping up the Gym Challenge and making a big deal out of it, but it felt like the side characters like Sonia and Leon were actually doing the interesting stuff: exploring myths and legends to piece together what happened.

Meanwhile, you get dangled by a carrot in the form of Hop, by far the most annoying rival in a pokémon game, who asks for a battle every five minutes and exclaims at the fact you used a super-effective move to “gain an advantage” when he’s literally been growing up watching his older brother be a pokémon champion his entire life, who uses Scary Face with his Corviknight twice in a row in the semi-finals of the Champions Cup, and who cannot for the life of him get a hang of not sending a pokémon whose typing is inferior to the one that he’s up against on the battlefield.

At least the mini-quest in the postgame that involved catching the legendary pokémon was slightly more interesting. Two hilarious character show up and it’s a bit more enjoyable than the main quest, even if it is very repetitive and predictable. And that’s saying a lot about the actual main plot of the game. Even the antagonists of the main story are some wacko security force called “Macro Cosmos” who were hired guns to protect the Chairman, and their models all look exactly the same (jeez). The token team this time around is also a joke, called Team Yell, who aren’t even evil at all. They just cheer on for another trainer to support her through her journey. Like…okay, sure.

Despite all this, there are hints of greatness in the game. I’ve been saying pokémon needs a Persona-esque battle system in order to truly evolve, and it comes so close to it in the form of max raid battles. Except you can’t fight them with members of your own team, you have to team up with useless AI companions to fight them. Persona 5 has nailed the four-character turn-based control system, and pokémon desperately needs it. I was so badly hoping that the max raid battles would work like that, but they don’t.

Having pokémon in the overworld is a welcome return from Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee, but if you’re doing this, why not have pokémon follow you too?! Why not display the trainers with one of their pokémon next to them before they lock eyes with you and challenge you for a fight? It would make the relationship between people and pokémon so much stronger in the otherwise dead world.

You can tell the creators of the game were having fun with the game because they put Ball Guy in it. Yes, the mascot of the Gym Challenge is a dude named “Ball Guy”, who wears a pokéball on his head, cheers you on at every stadium, and hands you various types of pokéballs. He’s just a wacky dude in general, but is a hilarious sight to see and has some very funky animations. I also really appreciated how big a role some of the gym leaders played in the main story outside of their own gyms and cities. Typically, gym leaders are confined to their own gym and rarely ever step out into the world, if even into the city that their gym is in. This game had me pleasantly surprised with the gym leaders going all over the place and doing things. Some like Opal and Piers were certainly favored over ones like Kabu and Melony though, which I found a little odd.

I didn’t point out the graphics, low-res textures, or pop-in issues because those things typically don’t make or break a game for me if the gameplay is fun. And the gameplay here was good. The Wild Area visuals are not impressive, let’s be real. The game suffers from a serious lack of art direction. Breath of the Wild is sparse and empty too, but the world and landscape is incredibly beautiful and well put together. All of the terrain feels handcrafted and the vistas are so iconic. In Pokémon, it just feels half-assed and plopped together without much thought. Good art direction can mask a lot of these issues, but this game didn’t even have that.

So yeah, these are my high-level impressions after completing the main story in about ~30 hours. I’m in the Battle Tower right now, and I’m sure I’ll try out some of the rental teams in there after a few weeks. I’m both satisfied and disappointed in the experience. I definitely expected a lot more than this for the series’ entry onto the Switch, and while this wasn’t exactly a letdown, I also wish it was so much more. I won’t be playing competitively in Sword & Shield, so I can’t comment too much on the breeding and EV-training aspects of the game yet. The #Dexit phenomenon has definitely left a sour taste amongst the fanbase, and the fact that I cannot import my full competitive battling teams from the past games is a massive disappointment. I still enjoyed the games a lot more than I thought I would. I just wish Nintendo held Gamefreak and the Pokémon franchise up to the same level of quality that they do with Mario, Zelda, and Metroid.