Pokémon Pokopia Review: The Best Pokémon Game in Years Doesn't Let You Catch Anything

There are no gyms in Pokopia. There are no badges, no league, no rival, and no team of six. You cannot catch anything. For a franchise turning thirty this year, that is a genuinely startling set of things to leave out, and it is the reason this is the fourth best-selling game of 2026 and the best-received Pokémon release in three decades.

What you get instead is a life sim and a building game sharing one world. You wake up in an abandoned, drained-out version of Kanto with no humans in it, guided by a Tangrowth who has appointed itself professor, and you rebuild the place block by block until things want to live there again. Pokémon do not join your party. They move in.

It is not a small game dressed up as a spin-off. It is dense, it is long, and it has a better central idea in it than the mainline series has had in years. It also has some real irritations, and one of them is going to decide whether you can live with it.

You play as a Ditto that has taken the shape of its former trainer. It is not a convincing disguise — the character has an odd, slightly plasticine look that the game is fully aware of and never explains away. It is also the single best design decision here, and it took thirty years for somebody to think of it.

In every other Pokémon game, the creatures fight for you. Here they teach you. Because you are a shapeshifter, learning a move from a Pokémon you have befriended is not a gameplay conceit bolted onto the fiction, it is the most canonically sensible thing that could possibly happen. Bulbasaur gives you Leech Seed and now you can grow grass. Squirtle gives you Water Gun and now you can put moisture back into dead soil. Scyther gives you Cut, Hitmonchan gives you Rock Smash, and Magikarp gives you Splash, which turns out to be how you jump. That last one is very funny and also genuinely useful, which sums the whole game up.

Progression is therefore social rather than mechanical. You do not level up. You meet somebody, do them a favour, and walk away able to reshape the world in a way you could not before. It reframes the entire franchise: these are not tools you own, they are neighbours who taught you something, and the game never once lets you forget which of those it is.

Omega Force made Dragon Quest Builders 2, and it shows in the best way. Everything is blocks — wood, sand, grass, soil, stone — and you break them down and suck them up with a vacuum ability that is both very Kirby and, given that you are a Ditto, entirely reasonable. The interface is Builders-like, which means it is far more approachable than Minecraft while still letting you do essentially whatever you want.

The campaign moves you from map to map, each one hand-built rather than generated, with abandoned structures that feel like somebody lived in them and left. You can strip those buildings for parts and take the parts home. Then, once the story has run its course, the game hands you a large open map with no objectives at all and lets you go. That is where most of the hundreds of hours people are putting into this are going.

There is a genuine tension in here between two design philosophies, and Pokopia mostly resolves it. One half wants to give you daily tasks, timers and requests. The other half wants to hand you a shovel and get out of the way. It manages both by keeping the structured half as the campaign and the free half as everything after, and the join is much smoother than it has any right to be.

The real-time timers are the big one. Set a building in motion and it takes actual hours, so you close the game and come back. Certain activities are once per day and that is that. Some people will find this a pleasant reason to put the console down. We found it a handbrake, especially early on when you are still learning the systems and every interesting thing is behind a wait. This is a mechanic borrowed from Animal Crossing and it is the one thing we would have left behind.

Inventory is the other persistent annoyance. Storage boxes fill with junk fast, there is no automatic sorting, and you cannot pull materials out of storage while building. Every crafting game of the last five years has solved this and Pokopia simply has not, so you will spend real time shuffling things between boxes in a game explicitly designed to be relaxing.

Beyond that it is a pile of small things. Placing objects is fiddly. Watering and rock-breaking are less precise than they should be. The middle of the game opens up so fast that you can drown in side objectives with nothing telling you what matters. And the music, which is doing the standard gentle-Nintendo-piano thing, is so low-energy that after twenty hours it stopped soothing us and started grating.