Name: Pokémon Pokopia Review
Uploaded: 2026-03-07T21:39:44.000Z
Duration: 18 min 58 s
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Adverbs of manner

Given the recent love for Pokemon stuff that simply lets you watch them hang out in different environments, it's astonishing that it took this long for Pokemon Pokopia to emerge.

It marries two ideas that probably should have been smashed together a long time ago Life Sims and Pokemon.

Koei Tecmo's Omega Force was the right studio to snatch the idea up too, after its success working on Dragon Quest Builders 2 with Square Enix and its ongoing positive reputation for Dynasty warriors and Nintendo crossovers.

Given all this, I came into Pokemon Pocopia having built up skyscraper high hopes, and

I'm happy to say it exuberantly met me at the top.

In Pocopia, you play as a Ditto that has transformed into the roughly human shape of their former trainer who is now missing.

Ditto is released unexpectedly into a Kanto region that looks quite different from what you might remember in other games.

You start in the ruins of what you'll very quickly recognize as Fuchsia City, but

drought stricken and with buildings reduced to rubble.

A friendly Tangrowth posing as a Pokemon professor is there to greet you, and

together the two of you undertake a 40 plus hour effort to restore the region to its full former glory in hopes of attracting both people and Pokemon back home.

This turns out to be a pretty compelling premise, both in the mystery you'll slowly uncover about what happened to the world, as well as in how that recovery ties closely to your actual minute to minute tasks.

You'll start by rebuilding natural Pokemon habitats such as patches of tall grass or flowers, which will in turn attract new Pokemon to come live within them, But

eventually you'll construct whole buildings and furniture pieces as you build out your little community.

As a Ditto, you have the ability to transform into other Pokemon, allowing you to use their abilities to restore the land.

For instance, a Squirtle will teach you Water Gun early on, which allows you to water the dry ground and bring back dead trees, bushes, grass and flowers.

From a Bulbasaur, Ditto learns leafage, allowing them to raise up new tall grass from previously empty ground.

Rock smash breaks, rocks cut, chops up foliage, and so on.

Much later you'll be able to turn into a Lapras to surf across water, and

finally a Dragonite will teach you to fly well, glide through the air.

This is where a lot of Procopia's personality shines as it really goes all in on reminding you that you are a Ditto, a blobby pink creature that can shapeshift into anything.

When it uses Water Gun and Green vine arms for leafage, it can suck items into its inventory in bulk by slurping them up into its mouth, Kirby style, effectively absorbing them until it needs to spit one back out again.

If you fall from a great height, never fear.

You just blop into a pink goo for a moment and then reform into your human shape.

There is so much attention to detail in Bocopia's animations and its marriage of mechanics and character, and

all these little touches combine to keep me locked into the universe and fantasy of being a Ditto dressed as a person glooping about this ruined world.

I didn't really care about Ditto before, but after Pocopia, I love this little weirdo.

That level of detail extends to your Pokemon friends, all of whom are given colorful personalities and plenty of things to do once they settle into their new homes.

You can give them gifts to raise their comfort levels and affection for Ditto, which will often result in them giving you gifts.

In turn, they'll invite you to play games or give you little quizzes on Pokemon facts.

Pokemon will just have fun on their own, too.

You can watch them react to items you leave out in the world, play tag with one another, or even make friends with their neighbors.

Each Pokemon also has different abilities that dictate how they interact with the world.

You'll frequently want to enlist Pokemon like Scyther to chop wood for you, or Piplup to wash away sewage, which is a mostly great way to highlight the strengths of Pokemon that don't normally get the spotlight.

I say mostly because I was a bit irritated later on by how much trekking back and forth between areas I had to do to figure out which Pokemon I left all my iron ore with, or who was converting my clay into bricks.

But largely, it was a positive that almost every Pokemon had a genuinely cool purpose.

Between all that and the presence of a sizable Pokedex, I found myself very motivated to design increasingly complex habitats to attract rarer and rarer monsters in hopes of filling out every last entry.

As more Pokemon return to the world, they'll start to want more than just a patch of grass to lounge in.

every one of those chores provides a satisfactory dopamine rush as you watch a new building appear or a patch of previously barren landscape fill out with cute creatures doing adorable activities.

The loop was so engrossing that I did not once mind the absence of any combat, something present in Dragon Quest Builders, but

for pretty obvious story reasons, not a part of Pocopia, it doesn't need it.

One minor issue that tripped me up, however, was the storage in Pocopia.

Ditto has an inventory that can be expanded over time, and

you can also construct storage boxes, both small and large, to put more items in.

because there's no unified storage, by the end of Procopia, I was having trouble remembering what box and what region I had put that certain item I now needed.

Frequently, when a quest called for something specific, I had to fast travel between multiple regions through multiple loading screens, then look through multiple multiple boxes just to find it.

I understand wanting to limit storage during Procopia's story mode so that you don't haul enormous quantities of junk from place to place and are instead forced to use each new environment to solve your problems.

But the post game really, really needed some sort of unified, interconnected storage box between all the regions into which I can just dump 20 stacks of 99 sand.

As Bukopia progresses, the dozens of little chores slowly evolve into bigger, more grandiose projects.

There are four main story regions to explore and reconstruct, each with different habitats, monsters and themes to build around.

Pickopia's actual construction mechanics will be familiar to anyone who's played these cube based building games before.

You break up the blocks of the environment, collect them in your inventory, craft other blocks out of gathered resources, then stack cubes, make structures, and

I unfortunately suspect that savvier builders than myself may not be thrilled by the building controls.

I frequently found it difficult to position blocks exactly where I wanted them due to limitations on where and how I could move them.

There's an awesome post game transform ability that improves the experience quite a bit, but

even with that on, I was wishing for just a touch more precision.

The story regions of Pocopia have loads of ruined building foundations and other suggestions of spaces that you could start from, or you can tear it all down and begin anew.

It's a healthy, enjoyable mix of freedom and guidance that satisfied both the desire to make anything I wanted and the need at times to just get a dang house up and move on.

As someone who's not great at making aesthetically pleasing spaces, I was grateful for the presence of building kits that when filled with resources and assigned some worker Pokemon, would become pre made structures that actually looked nice, allowing me to skip most large scale manual construction if I chose to.

And then there's Pallet Town, a bonus non story region exploring explicitly set aside for players to build from scratch.

It's so massive I have no idea how to even begin turning it into a proper metropolis.

There's enough space to build huge absurd sculptures like folks have been doing in Minecraft for years, or get together with friends and construct an entire Pokemon filled world with multiple towns.

I'm stoked to see what the real artists get up to in there.

One of the most surprising and wonderful elements in Popopia is the story.

So much of my delight in Popopia is in wandering through this ruined version of Kanto, collecting notes and logs explaining what happened to the world, then stumbling into locations that will be recognizable to longtime Pokemon fans like me, walking into a ruin and feeling the gut punch as I realized where I was and what happened here here really, really hit.

And Progopopia's capitalization on that feeling is pristine.

Not to mention the excellent soundtrack as well, which sprinkles in familiar melodies in exactly the right dose, then twists those tunes around in a reminder that the world is not what it once was.

Fans familiar with the original games or their remakes might get more out of this than those who haven't played them, but

I think that the environmental storytelling, the slow drip of clues, and

the contrast between the tragic fate of this world and Procopia's cheery tone should be able to hook even those with a less intimate knowledge of the setting.

Pokemon Popopia is a real treat, an enjoyable building and town simulator that capitalizes on the charming personalities of its monsters in a way that appeals to both the creative and collector alike.

It's packed with fun things to do and worthy rewards for doing them, and

strikes a healthy balance between freedom and suggestion in its building mechanics.

Despite a few precision nitpicks, all of this is housed in an adorable adventure through an interesting and surprisingly deep setting that presses all the nostalgia buttons for longtime fans, and

it all shines especially bright in its lovable protagonist's blobby pink hands.

Reviews Director Tom Marks here with Rebecca Valentine to talk a little bit more about her Pokemon Pocopia review, but

I'm sure you've seen Rev has been our Pokemon reviewer for a while now.

You did Pokemon Legends, both Zaa and Arceus, you did Scarlet and Violet and all of its DLCs, you did brilliant diamond and Shining Pearl, and

then also just other RPG's in general stuff beyond that.

But you're a big Pokemon fan and we love having you on to Talk about Pokemon.

We did that at the end of your review of Z to A.

We talked a lot about your Pokemon tastes.

So if you're interested in that and hearing about Rebs Pokemon tastes generally speaking, you can go and check out the end of that review.

But let's also talk about sort of the other half of Pocopia, which is a life sim buildy game.

It falls into this weird category of like, it's not quite Stardew, it's not quite Animal Crossing.

It's a little bit of a mix of all of these things.

So just tell me, like, what do you like about these sort of cozy games and what are some of your favorites there?

I tend to be very picky about cozy games.

There was a period in my life where I started getting, you know, I got really into Stardew Valley like everybody else.

And then I think I got targeted by a lot of pitches from people trying to get me to play their cozy games.