This review contains spoilers
Pokémon Sword and Shield are almost 3 years old, and we’re already moving onto the next major Pokémon game already. It felt like it was the right time to revisit these games. Pokémon Sword and Shield have the unique placement of being the series’ first mainline console game. They also released on the Switch, when every other Nintendo series were reinventing themselves. To say that Sword and Shield were sitting on a hotspot of expectations would be an understatement, but by launch we all knew what kind of game this was. Pokémon Sword and Shield is an iterative sequel that’ll be placed right next to all the other iterative sequels. However, that isn’t an objectively bad thing, and that’s exactly why I want to see where it stands in the series.
To summarize the presentation, these games follow up Pokémon Sun and Moon’s style without much change. The soundtrack is alright, but uses some real terrible MIDI samples in some places. Some songs are hit harder by this than others. Graphically, they use a cell shading-like shader with some coloured outlines. Bloom effects loudly sheen off every Pokémon model. The game looks the most polished in towns, the routes have some weird assets but look fine, and the open Wild Areas have tons of graphical hijinks. There isn’t much to add to the graphics conversation, so to comment on the positive improvements: While 90% of moves still generically apply to Pokémon when they use it, this game introduces a handful of unique moves that compliment the Pokémon they’re attached to well. The trainer animations during battle also have a ton of character appeal. The negatives culminate in a game that doesn’t feel as polished as the average Nintendo game.
Most Pokémon games have minimal storytelling, but this one is a bit different. Similar to some of the recent games, a combination of cutscenes and extra dialogue puts a bit more dramatic focus on the story. The story vaguely uses Britain’s competitive sports culture as a pastiche for a competition fueled region, which works pretty well. Your rival is Hop, who’s one of the best rivals in the series, primarily because his arc is honest. He’s anxious about living up to his older brother and childhood friend, but realizes that competition isn’t all there is to life and uses his experiences to find new passions. It’s cute, and smarter than most rivals having their arcs get smashed by the protagonist. The rest of the rivals are also pretty likable, so it’s the plot climax where the game gets messy. The story of Eternatus just isn’t great at all, its backstory is so messy. The plot tries to make the antagonist morally gray, but doesn’t elaborate on their motivations enough. And don’t get me started on Sordward or Shielbert. While the rivals improve from the extra dialogue, the villains have too much dialogue paired with a nothing plotline. The plot never even gets the chance to explain what exactly Dynamax is.
Dynamax features as this game’s main battle gimmick, and it’s not all bad. Every “Max move” has this synergetic side effect that results in cool team-up attack moments during player battles. Unfortunately, there’s only one Dynamax double battle in the whole campaign, so most players won’t see any of that. Dynamax lacks appeal to most players because it’s a nonsense concept, titled with a nonsense name, with no worldbuilding or visual appeal to at least make it cool nonsense. There are at least Gigantamax forms that change in design, but these are elusive and impossible to obtain on your playthrough without grinding. This is the most a mainline Pokémon gimmick has felt dead on arrival, the game didn’t even try to make it seem cool to people.
Max Raids are a new multiplayer co-op mode, and they offer a unique way to interact with the game socially that Pokémon didn’t really have before. Getting to team up with 3 friends is great, though they lack a bit in variety. There are some hard ones once you beat the game, but the shields they gain during parts of the fight ignore super effective moves and status effects, making strategy repetitive. This is a wonderful feature on paper, but it definitely needs some iterating. Other than these two new mechanics, the combat is the same as it always has been.
However, when you rank formulaic sequels against their precursors, content depth stands out just as much as gameplay iteration. This game does contain a 15-20 hour campaign with an hour long post-game quest, and a handful of things to grind out. This is like every game. It also has the least amount of routes in any Pokémon game, doesn’t have any optional areas at all, has very few side quests, no super-bosses, and barely any daily events. It’s the first game in the series to not have every existing Pokémon, but I couldn’t tell you how many more hours I would’ve gotten out of being able to use a Weedle. Probably not any at all, but it’s clear that Sword and Shield cut down both the fat and the meat. What this does tell me is that Pokémon at its most lean is still a sizable experience, with cooperating with friends to complete the Pokédex, and some online battling and shiny hunting. I also know that most players and most playthroughs are never going to touch any of that stuff, so for the sake of most players, make the campaigns good.
The biggest new tagline feature of Pokémon Sword and Shield is the Wild Area. The Wild Area was advertised as a home console-worthy innovation, immediately drawing comparisons to the concepts and innovation of games such as Breath of the Wild. I can’t say with certainty that there wasn’t any inspiration coming from contemporary Switch releases, but the Wild Area is more about Pokémon Go than anything else. The Wild Area is a reaction to Pokémon Go, analyzing what exactly made catching so tantalizing for people. This comes back to the conceptual start of the series, as Pokémon was one of the first series to take advantage of social experience for playing through a single player campaign. The amount of choices that comes with being able to build a team out of 150 monsters make your teams feel inherently personalized. This makes everything from teams to finding a Pokémon in the wild for the first time feel like something worth sharing. We see this trend across the games industry now, with scores and gacha results being posted all over social media. Pokémon Go richly takes advantage of the core of these traits. Both the original Pokémon games and Pokémon Go play to our wants for personalization, our sense of discovery, and our likening to be rewarded for exploration. Pokémon Sword and Shield analyze this through the vein of a central hub of Pokémon discovery moments. It plays a video game magic trick; visibly dangling hundreds of personalized options for the player to pick from, urging us to tell our friends about our teams later. Unfortunately, this is a one trick magic show, as the discovery factor fades on most playthroughs the moment we’ve caught enough to form a team. The terrain we explore is flat and without secrets, and the game doesn’t have satisfying movement that makes exploring it feel good either. And while this isn’t a new issue, the rigid numbers game of catching feels much more like it’s interrupting the game flow in an RPG like Sword and Shield. This isn’t an issue in Pokémon Go, since catching is the entire game. I don’t think the Wild Area made catching feel more interesting, it didn’t make me want to complete the Pokédex. Despite that, the magic trick still worked on me, about once per playthrough. Gawking at the jumbles of options that form the Wild Area was a unique experience. The center of these games really is the Pokémon choices.
Lastly, that brings me to the new Pokémon. I can’t objectively summarize things these Pokémon do right or wrong on a visual design level, as aesthetic issues I have with the Pokédex aren’t easy to summarize. Most of the designs are clean, some use some gaudy neon palettes, but that’s about it for broad aesthetic issues. Where I run into issues is in their origins and inspirations. The Galar region is based on Great Britain, and I can’t help but find its inspirations too superficial. Almost every new Pokémon is a species repeat; the starter Pokémon aren’t based on animals that live in Britain, and the new legendaries are all simplistic medieval knights and dragons reference. Regional variants were introduced in Pokémon Sun and Moon as a reference to divergent evolution, but end up being used in this game only to apply references to Britain to existing Pokémon. It fixates more on fictionally exaggerated royalty than the actual real world Britain. This superficiality doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of individual designs. I still liked a handful of new Pokémon; Corviknight and Falinks being highlights. It just made me question why they chose Britain in the first place, if they were interested in such a small slice of its history and wildlife. It was equally hard to ignore that it felt like the game didn’t care about the new Pokémon. Almost none of the new Pokémon show up in the Wild Area, or even in overworld encounters on routes. Lots of them are locked behind shaking grass-random encounters and appear only at 1% chances. This statistically obscured availability felt like the game was trying to urge me to stick to the Charizards and avoid the new stuff.
The game also got a DLC expansion in 2020, which was pretty cool. It directly responded to some of my critiques listed earlier on: with better verticality in its level design, more Galar Pokémon integrated into the overworld, and a new form of max raids that don’t use shields. The main issue is these expansions aren’t formatted great; there are almost no battles and their content depth heavily relies on if you want to complete the Pokédex. However, Pokémon being integrated into an overworld of diverse biomes definitely makes catching more interesting, even if the game design isn’t improved.
This game taught me a lot about how I interact with this series, and my standards for it. I put a lot more hours into this game than Sun and Moon. I completed the Pokédex, I traded and raided with friends, and I did a ton of wifi battling. And yet, I never ended up feeling a love-hate relationship with the game, despite all these problems I had with it. This led me to concluding that the controversy of Pokémon Sword and Shield was an expectations game. At the center of this web of biases, I feel conflicted knowing I want to criticize this game’s faults, knowing that I wished the game took bigger steps. And knowing at the same time, if someone asked me for a recommendation, I’d say something like “yeah it’s like pretty fun i guess”. Maybe the formula of Pokémon has been so cleanly refined over the years, that if you take advantage of every feature, you’ll always have a “pretty fun” time with it. And maybe it’s that fine line between adequacy and mediocrity that will always turn fans into dreamers.
To summarize the presentation, these games follow up Pokémon Sun and Moon’s style without much change. The soundtrack is alright, but uses some real terrible MIDI samples in some places. Some songs are hit harder by this than others. Graphically, they use a cell shading-like shader with some coloured outlines. Bloom effects loudly sheen off every Pokémon model. The game looks the most polished in towns, the routes have some weird assets but look fine, and the open Wild Areas have tons of graphical hijinks. There isn’t much to add to the graphics conversation, so to comment on the positive improvements: While 90% of moves still generically apply to Pokémon when they use it, this game introduces a handful of unique moves that compliment the Pokémon they’re attached to well. The trainer animations during battle also have a ton of character appeal. The negatives culminate in a game that doesn’t feel as polished as the average Nintendo game.
Most Pokémon games have minimal storytelling, but this one is a bit different. Similar to some of the recent games, a combination of cutscenes and extra dialogue puts a bit more dramatic focus on the story. The story vaguely uses Britain’s competitive sports culture as a pastiche for a competition fueled region, which works pretty well. Your rival is Hop, who’s one of the best rivals in the series, primarily because his arc is honest. He’s anxious about living up to his older brother and childhood friend, but realizes that competition isn’t all there is to life and uses his experiences to find new passions. It’s cute, and smarter than most rivals having their arcs get smashed by the protagonist. The rest of the rivals are also pretty likable, so it’s the plot climax where the game gets messy. The story of Eternatus just isn’t great at all, its backstory is so messy. The plot tries to make the antagonist morally gray, but doesn’t elaborate on their motivations enough. And don’t get me started on Sordward or Shielbert. While the rivals improve from the extra dialogue, the villains have too much dialogue paired with a nothing plotline. The plot never even gets the chance to explain what exactly Dynamax is.
Dynamax features as this game’s main battle gimmick, and it’s not all bad. Every “Max move” has this synergetic side effect that results in cool team-up attack moments during player battles. Unfortunately, there’s only one Dynamax double battle in the whole campaign, so most players won’t see any of that. Dynamax lacks appeal to most players because it’s a nonsense concept, titled with a nonsense name, with no worldbuilding or visual appeal to at least make it cool nonsense. There are at least Gigantamax forms that change in design, but these are elusive and impossible to obtain on your playthrough without grinding. This is the most a mainline Pokémon gimmick has felt dead on arrival, the game didn’t even try to make it seem cool to people.
Max Raids are a new multiplayer co-op mode, and they offer a unique way to interact with the game socially that Pokémon didn’t really have before. Getting to team up with 3 friends is great, though they lack a bit in variety. There are some hard ones once you beat the game, but the shields they gain during parts of the fight ignore super effective moves and status effects, making strategy repetitive. This is a wonderful feature on paper, but it definitely needs some iterating. Other than these two new mechanics, the combat is the same as it always has been.
However, when you rank formulaic sequels against their precursors, content depth stands out just as much as gameplay iteration. This game does contain a 15-20 hour campaign with an hour long post-game quest, and a handful of things to grind out. This is like every game. It also has the least amount of routes in any Pokémon game, doesn’t have any optional areas at all, has very few side quests, no super-bosses, and barely any daily events. It’s the first game in the series to not have every existing Pokémon, but I couldn’t tell you how many more hours I would’ve gotten out of being able to use a Weedle. Probably not any at all, but it’s clear that Sword and Shield cut down both the fat and the meat. What this does tell me is that Pokémon at its most lean is still a sizable experience, with cooperating with friends to complete the Pokédex, and some online battling and shiny hunting. I also know that most players and most playthroughs are never going to touch any of that stuff, so for the sake of most players, make the campaigns good.
The biggest new tagline feature of Pokémon Sword and Shield is the Wild Area. The Wild Area was advertised as a home console-worthy innovation, immediately drawing comparisons to the concepts and innovation of games such as Breath of the Wild. I can’t say with certainty that there wasn’t any inspiration coming from contemporary Switch releases, but the Wild Area is more about Pokémon Go than anything else. The Wild Area is a reaction to Pokémon Go, analyzing what exactly made catching so tantalizing for people. This comes back to the conceptual start of the series, as Pokémon was one of the first series to take advantage of social experience for playing through a single player campaign. The amount of choices that comes with being able to build a team out of 150 monsters make your teams feel inherently personalized. This makes everything from teams to finding a Pokémon in the wild for the first time feel like something worth sharing. We see this trend across the games industry now, with scores and gacha results being posted all over social media. Pokémon Go richly takes advantage of the core of these traits. Both the original Pokémon games and Pokémon Go play to our wants for personalization, our sense of discovery, and our likening to be rewarded for exploration. Pokémon Sword and Shield analyze this through the vein of a central hub of Pokémon discovery moments. It plays a video game magic trick; visibly dangling hundreds of personalized options for the player to pick from, urging us to tell our friends about our teams later. Unfortunately, this is a one trick magic show, as the discovery factor fades on most playthroughs the moment we’ve caught enough to form a team. The terrain we explore is flat and without secrets, and the game doesn’t have satisfying movement that makes exploring it feel good either. And while this isn’t a new issue, the rigid numbers game of catching feels much more like it’s interrupting the game flow in an RPG like Sword and Shield. This isn’t an issue in Pokémon Go, since catching is the entire game. I don’t think the Wild Area made catching feel more interesting, it didn’t make me want to complete the Pokédex. Despite that, the magic trick still worked on me, about once per playthrough. Gawking at the jumbles of options that form the Wild Area was a unique experience. The center of these games really is the Pokémon choices.
Lastly, that brings me to the new Pokémon. I can’t objectively summarize things these Pokémon do right or wrong on a visual design level, as aesthetic issues I have with the Pokédex aren’t easy to summarize. Most of the designs are clean, some use some gaudy neon palettes, but that’s about it for broad aesthetic issues. Where I run into issues is in their origins and inspirations. The Galar region is based on Great Britain, and I can’t help but find its inspirations too superficial. Almost every new Pokémon is a species repeat; the starter Pokémon aren’t based on animals that live in Britain, and the new legendaries are all simplistic medieval knights and dragons reference. Regional variants were introduced in Pokémon Sun and Moon as a reference to divergent evolution, but end up being used in this game only to apply references to Britain to existing Pokémon. It fixates more on fictionally exaggerated royalty than the actual real world Britain. This superficiality doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of individual designs. I still liked a handful of new Pokémon; Corviknight and Falinks being highlights. It just made me question why they chose Britain in the first place, if they were interested in such a small slice of its history and wildlife. It was equally hard to ignore that it felt like the game didn’t care about the new Pokémon. Almost none of the new Pokémon show up in the Wild Area, or even in overworld encounters on routes. Lots of them are locked behind shaking grass-random encounters and appear only at 1% chances. This statistically obscured availability felt like the game was trying to urge me to stick to the Charizards and avoid the new stuff.
The game also got a DLC expansion in 2020, which was pretty cool. It directly responded to some of my critiques listed earlier on: with better verticality in its level design, more Galar Pokémon integrated into the overworld, and a new form of max raids that don’t use shields. The main issue is these expansions aren’t formatted great; there are almost no battles and their content depth heavily relies on if you want to complete the Pokédex. However, Pokémon being integrated into an overworld of diverse biomes definitely makes catching more interesting, even if the game design isn’t improved.
This game taught me a lot about how I interact with this series, and my standards for it. I put a lot more hours into this game than Sun and Moon. I completed the Pokédex, I traded and raided with friends, and I did a ton of wifi battling. And yet, I never ended up feeling a love-hate relationship with the game, despite all these problems I had with it. This led me to concluding that the controversy of Pokémon Sword and Shield was an expectations game. At the center of this web of biases, I feel conflicted knowing I want to criticize this game’s faults, knowing that I wished the game took bigger steps. And knowing at the same time, if someone asked me for a recommendation, I’d say something like “yeah it’s like pretty fun i guess”. Maybe the formula of Pokémon has been so cleanly refined over the years, that if you take advantage of every feature, you’ll always have a “pretty fun” time with it. And maybe it’s that fine line between adequacy and mediocrity that will always turn fans into dreamers.