I didn’t expect to like Pokemon Sword as much as I did.
I feel like I’m in a tough position, because people have trash-talked this game for over a year. Rightly so in a lot of places. But a lot of that stuff hasn’t mattered to me.
Rather than talking about the widely discussed negative aspects in-depth, I’ll just talk about what I liked.
This isn’t even an aspect specific to this particular game, but I just love spending time in the Pokemon world. I love building a team of not only pokemon I like, but pokemon I think are cool. The pokemon you build a team around is a way to express yourself, and I really like thinking out which ones I would have in-universe. Would I have an Eevee? What would I choose to evolve it into? (Sylveon, obviously)
As for something more specific to this game, I love the Wild Area. It’s so cool seeing all the pokemon just wander about and I can choose who I want to fight. It definitely beats out random encounters from the previous generations. I spent a lot of time just wandering about catching pokemon I’d never realistically use. And I generally don’t do that. If I had a few friends that played this game, I could see myself going for a complete Pokedex.
I liked a lot of the story as well. Quite a few pokemon games have had boring supporting characters (in my opinion) but I genuinely enjoyed having Hop as a rival and constantly running into Marnie. Hop’s unrelenting optimism kept me going.
It’s interesting to see the changes made to the formula. I played a lot of Sun, but that was like 5 years ago, so I don’t remember if the changes to this game are a continuation of the changes made from Sun. There’s just straight up no elite four. That kinda surprised me. The story structure also felt kinda more cohesive. There wasn’t a lot of distractions to pull the player away from doing the gym challenge. Some people might like that, others might not.
Something that felt like a direct response to criticism from the fans, was how little the player character had an impact in the bad guy’s story. I’ve always heard people say, “Why is some 10 year old fighting the boss of a group who’s trying to destroy the world?” and it seems like they really took that criticism to heart. Most of the time some scary or dangerous event happens, it’s the champion to run to the help, and he just tells you to continue on your challenge while he deals with the dangerous stuff. It kinda grounded the story in a way I really appreciated.
As for what I didn’t like, it comes back to the story. I liked that the player wasn’t really directly involved with a lot of the bad guy’s plans, because why would some random 10 year old kid be the one to do it, it makes sense for the strongest trainer in the region to deal with dangerous scenarios. Unfortunately, this leads to an exposition dump at the end of the game where you finally learn what the champion was dealing with. The older characters do make an explicit point to not involve the kids, as they just want them to complete the gym challenge, but it didn’t feel satisfying from a writing perspective. You only learn what the stakes of the story are like 10 minutes before you fight the final legendary pokemon. The build-up isn’t as gradual as I would have hoped.
I don’t really have much else to say. I feel bad for not being as critical as others, but this isn’t a game I played to be critical of. I just wanted to chill with my Sylveon. But I guess I’m lucky that I could use Sylveon at all, a lot of people can’t even catch their favorite pokemon this generation. Those people didn’t get to hang out with their favorite pokemon. So I guess it’s a fair criticism.
I just kinda feel bad for Game Freak. They hit on a goldmine of an idea back in ’96. It instantly resonated with players and they loved to “catch ’em all”.
But the path they started on is becoming unsustainable. People become attached to their favorite pokemon. Hell, every single pokemon has it’s fanbase. Except for maybe Lickilicky…
What happens when they have to start cutting pokemon?
Because that was an unavoidable hurdle they’d have to reach at some point. There’s over 900 pokemon. There is no realistic way to animate and model these. And even if you do animate every single one of them, how many animations are there? I don’t know exactly how many animations each pokemon has in Sword/Shield, but it’s probably 6 or so. That’s 5400 UNIQUE animations. Of course, they reuse a lot from previous games, but when they add new features like Pokemon Camp and Curry Cooking, you add new animations that need to be made.
There was no question that they were gonna cull pokemon for one of the mainline games, it was just a matter of when.
I don’t know, it just don’t get to me that much. Crobat is tied for my favorite pokemon, but I couldn’t catch him in the base game. Zubat’s technically in the Crown Tundra DLC, but that’s post-game content. It didn’t really bother me that I couldn’t use Crobat in the main game, it just let me find new pokemon to use. Dreadnaw and Corviknight are some of my new favorites. It’s neat being forced out of my comfort zone.
I think I’ve talked about all I wanted to with this game.
I was lead to believe this game would be a lot worse than it actually is. It’s quite enjoyable as someone who hasn’t played since Omega Ruby. And if they can iron out some of the kinks that this game has, consider me excited for the next games in the series.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus has me curious about the direction of the series. You can see them testing the waters with open-world stuff in the base game and DLC, and I can’t wait to try out that game. I guess the true question is about the direction of Generation 9. I’m sure the “discourse” will be lovely…
Would I Recommend It?
I enjoyed my time with this game a whole lot. While you can find a lot of flaws in things like the story, the Pokedex, the battle system, I think this game is more than the sum of it’s parts. If you’re willing to look past some mild annoyances, it’s a real nice feel-good-game.