The Tiny Quiet Upgrade of Pokemon Sword/Shield
Not gonna lie, I fell for the trap of excitement at first.
I honestly thought Pokemon Sword/Shield was going to become the true next generation of Pokemon gaming, was going to be a mix of the old-school with new mechanisms and new features that takes advantage of powerful hardware. I honestly thought we would have that nice complete Breath of the Wild-sized video game with all the Pokemon available, with added depth, added environmental enhancements you couldn’t pull off on handheld hardware. I wanted dozens of badges, multiple tournaments, and multiple regions in the same adventure. I was hoping to finally get that Pokemon game a quarter-decade of Pokemon games would be leading up to.
But no, what we are seeing little by little is simply a big budgeted translation of 3DS sprites and 3DS-sized scope to the big screen, to Nintendo’s most powerful machine. And this reeks of pure disappointment considering the potential and considering how long it’s been since we’ve seen a challenging Pokemon game or even one that advances the limits of what the series can do (Pokemon Black/White 2 behaving as a direct sequel, Pokemon Sun/Moon shuffling the gym system and localizing the design of classic Pokemon).
The lack of a true Pokedex is the first major issue. So gamers and dedicated Pokemon fanatics who have been collecting Pokemon all these years and creating all these teams to compete won’t be able to transfer all their Pokemon to the newest edition? Adding salt to the wound is the fact that the Pokemon Bank was a paid service. So Gotta Catch Em’ All is just a bold-face lie now? Rumors are swirling about how Game Freak wants to eliminate the Pokedex entirely, which kills the concept that made the franchise a massive success in the first place. The superfans of Pokemon are most severely affected by this.
Now we have to talk about the graphics. The overworld and the cutscenes look nice in general, but the battle animations unfortunately has remained unevolved, with 3DS sprites jumping to the Switch and the movements of each character being severely limited. This also ties to the Pokedex problem, as Game Freak’s explanation for not all the Pokemon being able to transfer over to the new game being because the developers didn’t have the time or resources to draw and animate all the Pokemon in time for the game. But the Nintendo Switch has been in production since 2016, and we ALL knew the next Pokegames were going to be on the portable/console hybrid.
There was time to prepare, there was time to work on this, and lastly Nintendo fans are notorious for being able to wait years for the next game as long as the result is quality. Look at the wait between Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild, look at the fact that Nintendo was ballsy enough to directly tell the fans that they are starting Metroid Prime 4 from scratch and it won’t be ready for a while. Now imagine Call of Duty being delayed two years….
…I can still hear the screams…
So why not delay this Pokemon game until everyone and everything becomes available? Smash Brothers Ultimate thrived because they were able to bring back every character, and even provide different fighting mechanics to each individual. But we can’t animate 800 Pokemon sprites with basic movements? People were slightly skeptical on the graphics, and I had given them a chance, because I was under the assumption all Pokemon would be available somehow, someway.
And it wouldn’t even be as big an issue if the graphical strength of Sword/Shield was to the level of Mario Odyssey/Breath of the Wild; yet we can’t even claim that. Pokemon Snap didn’t even contain half the Pokedex 20 years and 4 gaming generations ago, but was nonetheless revered because the graphics at the time were among the best in the N64, and involved fully functioning Pokemon interacting with the environment and even with each other.
Pokemon Snap should have been the aim of Pokemon Sword/Shield; if you aren’t going to include them all, at least provide the depth and interactivity of a Zelda game that gives you a better sensation of a Pokemon environment. The strongest point in the film Detective Pikachu was how the Pokemon blended with the city and the humans. The concept of random battles being eliminated is nice and does give some personality to the region of Galar, and it does appear we are seeing a larger-than-normal area size for this upcoming chapter. But it still feels a little bit of a letdown we won’t be seeing all the creatures. Also feels like a letdown we won't drift too far from its typical main quest gym leader/B-plot involving evil organization setup. I would have loved to see a Pokemon game with like 100 badges that can be obtained in a variety of ways, and you won't reach the Final Four or the most intense tournament until you collect them all. If I can't collect all the Pokemon, at least let me collect all the badges I want.
Now, most of this might be overreaction to attempts to kill off the Pokedex. And there’s a good chance that this game will still be a nice, breezy, entertaining 30+ hour quest like the other games with plenty to do once the main quest is over. But I can’t help but feel like this was Game Freak’s opportunity to truly go nuts and make a massive game to the scale of what we’ve seen from Nintendo lately. They may not have Nintendo’s budget, but the Pokemon franchise makes billions a year, and is the second most-successful franchise in the history of gaming. Budget should not be an issue.
All previews and reactions from the critics and first-look players seem to draw the same conclusion about how this is going to be a game that stands in line with the others and features all of the elements that makes this JRPG the biggest in the business. A part of me though was yearning for a true revolution, a true expansion with enough content to keep you invested for years. Maybe we've become spoiled by Nintendo after seeing the upgrades to their heavy-hitting franchises like Mario Kart, 2-D and 3-D Mario, and Zelda.
This could have been the next coming out party for Pokemon. Instead, we’ll get a hot-selling game that reeks of “what could have been.”