Around the 35-hour mark, I finally rolled credits on Pokémon Pokopia. As anyone who’s made it to the end will tell you, it’s a bittersweet experience. I watched those closing animations play out with a tear in my eye, thinking about how far I’d come, how much my Ditto had grown, and how much my towns had evolved since I first set foot in them. Then the game reloaded, and I was immediately met with a harsh truth: my Withered Wasteland looked terrible.
Walkways consisted of every material I could lay my hands on at the time, houses were nothing more than a one-block-high rectangle with a door slapped on the front, and habitats seemed to be strewn all over the place as if built by a man who was only focused on raising the damn humidity of the area with no thought for the future.
The worst part? Every other biome was the same. I don’t want to discuss the amount of Volcanic Ash I found peppered on the floor in Rocky Ridges, and the number of half-built bridges, leading to nowhere in Bleak Beach put me to shame.
Truthfully, I had a small breakdown. How on earth can I have spent almost a day-and-a-half in this damn game and everything still looks so naff? But then I took a deep breath, spent a few minutes unlocking that final Ditto ability, and saw my save for what it really is: a beautiful mess.
Much like the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons back in 2020, Pokopia’s launch flooded my social media feeds with pristine towns and spectacular builds within hours of the game being out. Heck, I was still trying to hunt down a physical copy, and Instagram was already showcasing someone’s fully-decorated Poké spa complete with fog, or tree fruit farm with water pump and conveyor belt fruit delivery system.
As ever, trying to play the cute little creative game quickly reminded me of just how inept I am at building anything remotely aesthetic without a step-by-step video tutorial, so any hope of doing that five times went out the window the second I saw the true scope of Pokopia.
But still, it’s a sobering experience. Nobody wants to watch TikToks of a streamer’s eight-floor mansion only to return to their Withered Wasteland homestead and find a depressed Charmander staring at a wall from its solitary wooden stool.
It’s not so much that I had designed things badly, but rather that I rarely had the patience to see an idea through to the end. Those Bleak Beach bridges are a prime example. There’s an area immediately on the right as you leave the Pokémon Center that clearly used to be a hotspot for walkways over the water. Examining the ground, you can see the remnants of bridge supports, and you can even map them over the water to the nearby islands.
I started building a new foot traffic system as I helped Mosslax and Peakychu with the area’s main quest, but my interest must have waned after I had run out of my first stack of bricks, because what I envisaged as a Venetian postcard currently looks more akin to a series of stone diving boards, jutting out into the ocean.
The game is far too big for me to even think about cleaning up an entire area at once, so I changed my mindset and started focusing on micro-projects, where I could tend to something specific and leave the big picture for another day. I put in the foundations of a little picnic area in Withered Wasteland one day, mapped out a garden in Sparkling Skylands the next. The areas themselves still look shoddy and rough around the edges, but suddenly, little pockets were starting to take shape.
Perhaps it was me coming to terms with my own creative ineptitude, but the more I did this, the more I convinced myself that this is the point of Pokopia. These lands were never meant for replica castles, arcades, or a 1:1 model of an Empire Star Destroyer, they were meant to be a hodgepodge of ideas, gloriously imperfect.
It’s not to suggest that anyone who has flattened a biome and rebuilt it from the ground up is playing the game “wrong” — I have big ambitions for the middle areas of each town, and remain extremely envious of anyone who’s already been able to enact them — but there’s something about a story of creatures desperately trying to rebuild a civilisation they don’t fully understand that makes me think things are supposed to be messy.
I mean, take a look at your Ditto. As adorable as that little guy is, do you think there’s a single grain of town planning or feng shui understanding behind that vacant expression? I’m too indecisive to decide where a landmark building should go, for crying out loud, what hope does a sentient blob have?
And so, I’m embracing the mess. I still dream of carefully orchestrated living arrangements, complete with plant-covered exteriors and considered walkway placements, but I’m taking some time to focus on smaller projects first. Uniform pavements and houses more than one block high can wait until another time. I’ve got an impromptu bonfire area to plan.
