Pokemon Sword was one of the very few games which I have pre-ordered in the last few years (Final Fantasy XV, Pokemon Sun, Pokemon Sword). I love Pokemon, and was extremely excited for the game to be dropped off at my house on a Friday, and to spend a huge amount of time over the weekend playing. Since I am a grown man with many children, I had far less time than I estimated, and only recently have completed my journey to become the Galar region champion, but this is certainly one of my more contemporary reviews, so I trust that my faithful reader will have compassion on me.
It is really difficult to know where to start with this game. It had a huge amount of buzz and backlash surround the game, but I won't cover that in significant depth. The biggest issue surrounding the game's launch is that for the first time in the main series' history, you would not be able to obtain all of the previously released Pokemon in this one. With around 1000 Pokemon released to date, the fine folks at Game Freak decided that they would release a game with a more carefully curated selection of Pokemon (400).
I am conflicted by this decision. On the one hand, as a compulsive Pokemon collector who takes a tremendous amount of joy in "catching them all", it was a bit disappointing to me that I would have a far more streamlined amount of Pokemon to catch and evolve in this game. They had already begun in this direction in Pokemon Sun, and I frankly ripped them for it in my review. In Sun, they included assets for all of the Pokemon, but not Pokedex entries for them, which seemed like one of the easier parts of the process. Maybe I'm naive about creating Pokedex entries. Well, be careful what you wish for, because now they've gone all out and have stripped out more than half of the Pokemon from the games.
What is worse, some Pokemon that I have really enjoyed in the past didn't make the cut, along with some that I despised (I'm looking at you, Vanillite). Every Pokemon is somebody's favorite, and they're not making the games for me, but it did seem that they should have started with at least including each generation's starters, and they definitely did not do that.
With all of that being said, I also understand the case from Game Freak's perspective. Name me another RPG that is not named Pokemon that has 400 playable characters with individual character models, movesets, stats, etc. I'll wait. And they certainly put a significant amount of effort into animating the Pokemon at a much higher level than they have in the past. Pokemon now have models for the world map, camping, Pokedex entries, and battle, with way more detailed animations for every interaction.
On net, I'm disappointed, but still feel like you can deliver a functional Pokemon experience with 400, and maybe even a higher quality experience with some more depth. It's not what I would have chosen, but I also don't have to perform dozens of high-quality animations for hundreds of Pokemon in a wide range of settings, so I'll just be disappointed and not outraged.
This, in case you weren't aware, is a pretty standard Pokemon game. There are Pokemon to catch, Gym Leaders to challenge, and you are trying to become the Pokemon champion. You have a rival who will pester you for battles along the way, and really actually have more like 3 rivals in this game. You'll go through icy regions, rainy regions, idyllic regions, caves, etc. There are a few changes from previous games, however.
The wild Pokemon largely appear on screen now, rather than being concealed within the grass or under the water. This is a really nice change, and the single best improvement continued on from Pokemon Let's Go Eevee. No longer will you be ambushed by endless Pidgeys along the road. You can now avoid the Pidgeys and face the rarer creatures that will appear more infrequently, or take your chances with those monsters that are more concealed and roll the dice a bit.
There are no more gimmicky controls like in Eevee, which is wonderful. The catching experience is the same as it is traditionally, which is a very welcome return to form. They do include a nice little feature called casual controls that will let you play the game with 1 hand, which is a godsend for those of us with babies who demand to be held or wives who request backscratches and thus deplore evening video game playing. Note: this is definitely NOT me.
There is no more Elite Four, which hit me harder than I thought it would. Your Pokemon are now healed between the final sets of battles between challengers to become the Pokemon champion, which severely limits the already limited challenge of the game. I miss the Elite Four.
There is no mention of any of the mechanical changes from the last several games, including Mega Evolution, Z-Moves, and the use of environmental factors to trigger evolutions in certain Pokemon. For example, Glaceon, one of the Eevee evolutions, previously needed to be leveled up in the presence of an icy rock which was only located at particular points in the world, but now evolves with the simple application of an ice stone. I kind of miss the more intricate requirements for evolving these Pokemon, but the lack of Mega Evolution hits me the hardest. Some of these evolutions were extremely cool, or provided viability to Pokemon that were previously not very useful. RIP black Charizard.
In the place of these mechanics is the new Dynamax and Gigantimax forms, which allowed you to balloon your Pokemon up to unsustainable size and power for a few turns. This was not my favorite new mechanic, as it turns all of your moves into milquetoast nukes depending on their type, and seems to strongly favor sweeper-style Pokemon (I could be proven very wrong on that by the mathcrafters, but that's the way it feels). What's more, these forms can only be triggered in gym battles, raids, and during the end of game tournament, which really walls them off from a wider range of applicability. This leads to the feeling that these were a simple gimmick that will be quickly discarded in subsequent games.
They also removed all HM or HM style abilities from the game. Long-time observers will know that HMs used to be actual moves you would teach to your Pokemon that would enable them to interact with their environment out of battle by flying you to different cities, pushing heavy stones, cutting down plants blocking your way, or crusing across or under the waves. These were wonderfully replaced in Sun by ride Pokemon, dedicated creatures who could perform these functions for you, but now most environmental obstacles have been removed. You can now use your bike to travel on land or water, serving as both a bike and a surfing function, or call an air taxi to transport you to a city to which you've already traveled. But the lack of Cut, Rock Smash, or Strength crippled the ability of this game to engage in even the most rudimentary of puzzle solving skills, and the gameplay felt very dull as a result. It's just battle catch rinse repeat, with no variation at all. The gyms, traditionally the most prominent location for some puzzle solving, generally felt boring, with a few exceptions (the water and fighting gyms were excellent) because of the lack of these skills.
So, with all of these stripped out features, it would be safe to imagine that Sword rethought a lot of existing Pokemon features and added in a ton more, right? Especially with regards to the online experience, which a modern console should be able to more readily deliver? Right? Not really. The most sizable inclusion of new features is the Wild Area, an area that connects a few circuits of more traditional Pokemon cities, and has insanely varying weather that causes all manner of Pokemon to spawn at different times depending on said weather. You have a freely manipulable camera, and an open world to explore, with the opportunity to engage in raids of Dynamaxed Pokemon with other online Pokemon trainers. The promotions say that the Wild Area is as large as one of the regions in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it certainly didn't feel that way to me. I also haven't seen all of it, to be fair. These features sounds really cool, but I found the raids to be quite dull. It seemed impossible to find any other trainers online, which sounds insane for the launch week of a huge new game, because it is insane. Other trainers will show up in the Wild Area too, but get ready for massive framerate sputters and lag. The online for this game was not thought out particularly well, and was executed even more poorly.
The worst part of the online was the stripping out of the Global Trade Service, which was one of my favorite parts of the more modern games. In this system, you could propose a trade, and any person in the world could choose to accept your stipulations, and you'd receive the Pokemon when you logged back in. Well, in typical Nintendo fashion, they've now restricted your access online to your friends or mysterious people with no ability to set strictures on what kind of trade you'd like. Or you can take your luck with a totally random and immediate trade. In short, if you want to catch 'em all, you'll need some real friends. And real friends with the other version of the game. This exclusion alone knocked this review down a full half a point for me.
You can also camp with your Pokemon, which is cute. Once. I guess if you really roleplay this game hard and see yourself like Ash, defending the importance of your relationship with your precious Pokemon, you might enjoy throwing out Poke Balls for them to fetch, or petting them, or watching them play. You can also cook curry in an inscrutable system that is beyond me to explain. This will give you experience. Hooray.
One thing I expected was a more elaborate game filled with sidequests or more extended adventures between gyms. Weirdly, we got exactly the opposite. You basically will follow short routes between towns, and it will only take you roughly 10 minutes to go from gym to gym, with none of them save for the last one being difficult in the slightest. I took my time and caught every Pokemon I saw, and still only had about 18 hours in the game when I became Champion. You'll almost always have to explore a sinister organization's hideout to save the day several times throughout the Pokemon games, and there was almost none of that in this game. That is disappointing enough, but we also had almost no end game content in this one, save for a brief side story involving some legendary Pokemon, and the Battle Tower, as usual. I really expected this thing to be jam packed with content to trade off for all of the stripped Pokemon and features, and was genuinely disappointed.
There are also some new Pokemon included in the game, and some Galar forms of old Pokemon. The new designs are also pretty interesting and likable, and I genuinely found picking between the starters difficult this time.
Visually, the game is fine. It looks like a Pokemon game, plus about 20% of what you would expect on a 3DS. I expected a bit more, but I was never upset about it. The animations and models were definitely superior to those in Eevee, with many more to see. Occasionally you would get weird animations, like my Cinderace (a Pokemon based on a soccer player theme) using Headbutt by kicking, but for the most part, this is the most detailed "combat" we've seen in a Pokemon game.
The music is really, really good. There are a ton of gems in the soundtrack, and I really enjoyed the entire thing. Great music has defined the Pokemon franchise, and this continues that trend.
This was a very disappointing game. It felt thin throughout, with new features lacking the punch that they should have. None of the individual design choices they made throughout were indefensible, but the cumulative effect of those choices is a game that continually leaves you wanting a significant amount more. The dream of all Pokemon fans was to have a true, AAA style Pokemon adventure with all of the horsepower of a modern console, and while this game promised to fulfill that dream, it fell woefully short. With that being said, the core Pokemon mechanics are just so great and fun that it's impossible to call this a bad game. It certainly falls short of Red/Blue, Gold/Silver, Ruby/Sapphire, Diamond/Pearl, X/Y, and even Sun/Moon. But compared to most video games, it has to be considered solid. But Pokemon did not become the highest grossing media franchise of all-time by being "solid". Continual excellence is the path to maintaining the level of success that they have seen, and the last three entries leave me concerned for our collective Poke future. 7.5/10.
I'll be chewing through catching all of the 400 Pokemon the next few weeks, and am still unsure of what I'll be completing next, so stay tuned!
-TRO
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