It bears outlining my experience with the Pokemon franchise before discussing my thoughts on Sword and Shield. Pokemon Blue was the first video game I ever played at the age of four. My Blastoise, who I had cleverly named “Blue,” was my best friend, and we fought long and hard to make it through to the Elite Four and become champions. Since then, Pokemon has been a very central part of my life. I played every game in the series as it came out with the exception of Gen IV and V because at that time I was in high school and was way too cool for video games.
Of course in college being a nerd became cool again, and I distinctly remember the launch of XY when I was a junior. My roommate and I went to Gamestop on launch day squealing like actual children and each bought a 2DS and a copy each of X and Y. I was so unbelievably happy to be back. Pokemon has always been a place I felt I belonged. It’s a place of friendship, collecting fun and cool monsters, learning the power of teamwork, and becoming the best like no one ever was. My brother and I pretty much only ever played with Pokemon toys as kids. I had tons of plushes, played every spin off game, watched every episode of the show dozens if not hundreds of times. What I’m trying to say is that there is no media franchise more important to me than Pokemon.
Pokemon Sword and Shield is a Pokemon game. That may seem like a non-statement, but it’s perhaps the best summary I can muster. Pokemon is something that, because of its status as biggest franchise in the world as well as the biggest commonality between all of our childhoods, is impossible to review unbiased. If you reviewed Sword and Shield without having any prior experience with the series, I likely wouldn’t care about your review. Not because it’s invalid, but because we’d be seeing the game through two incomparable lenses. I am going to try and review this game as well as I can, but I want to confess up front it will be biased. As I said, I love Pokemon. It’s a huge part of my life. The main problem with trying to review this game is that no matter how bad it was, it was always going to be fun. Pokemon will never not be fun, no matter how bad it is. Such is a truth of the universe, and we’d all be happier if we’d just lay back and accept it.
The biggest negative of this game is not, in fact, the missing National Dex; Perhaps this is a bold statement, but Pokemon Sword and Shield would have been no better if it had featured all 900-something monsters. No, it is the frankly unacceptable visual and technical quality of the game, particularly the wild area. Already, here we are, exhibiting my previous point. This game’s quality is unacceptable, yet here I am accepting it because it is Pokemon.
The animations of Pokemon in the Wild Area (the open world online portion of the map) vary from unbelievable attention to detail to something that would have looked out of date in 2009. One minute you notice that Zigzagoon runs in zig zags like its name suggests and chuckle at it; the next minute you notice that Gyarados turns at sharp 90 degree angles as it swims like it’s a Disney World animatronic. The Wingull are floating on the breeze without flapping their wings like they’re supposed to, but, oh, that Hawlucha is running like a human man instead of flying. Pokemon based on prey animals run when they see you, those based on predator animals chase you when they see you to attack, and those that fit into neither category get confused and pause when seeing you. But once you move ten feet away from any Pokemon it vanishes in a puff of almost comical smoke.
The infamous image of the “N64 Tree” from the trailers is not a nitpick or out-of-context image. Every tree in the Wild Area looks like it’s straight out of Halo 2. The grass is rendered so badly I felt embarrassed for GameFreak while looking at it. The rocks, the dirt, rain. It all would have looked pretty bad in 2009. In 2019 it is, again, unacceptable. To use common parlance, this game looks like hot garbage. This is the biggest franchise in the world. The main series games should not look like hot garbage.
In the overworld, Pokemon are scaled appropriately to their recorded sizes. Step into a battle, however, and suddenly Caterpie is half the size of Wailord. Pokemon Colosseum, a game from 2002, had properly scaled Pokemon in battles. The graphical capabilities of the Switch are not the issue. Alongside Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8, Dragon Quest 11, Mario Odyssey, and Luigi’s Mansion 3… how could this game even be on the same system as those technical masterpieces? I can think of no explanation besides that the Galar Region’s map was made for 3DS and just blown up to 1080p as an afterthought.
The National Dex missing did not have the negative impact I had anticipated. I didn’t even notice, to be honest. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the game might be better for it. The smaller roster did allow for some forms of balance. I am upset my old team isn’t coming forward with me from Sun and Moon, but I left them on the Poke Pelago. They’ll be hanging out, eating beans, digging through the mines, and chilling in hot tubs for the rest of time. There are worse fates for the creatures I care about so deeply.
The game is not as long as previous versions, although that’s mostly due to the fact that it is the easiest game in the series — and that’s a pretty low bar. In fact, the only way I could create a challenge is to specifically avoid grinding at all. Fighting every trainer I saw, ignoring the wild area until the post game and never fighting wild Pokemon set me consistently at the perfect level to make each gym challenging and barely beatable. I slid through every gym on my last Pokemon with this method and felt that rush you only get when you beat that goon’s last dude with your guy in red health. Even for a children’s game, Pokemon Sword and Shield are much too easy. The permanent experience share unbalances the entire game and makes you much too powerful if you play the way you’ve played the other games. If you thought XY or Sun and Moon were too easy, those two are like hard mode compared to this.
The online experience has not improved much. Nintendo’s online functionalities continue to be lacking, and with the convoluted Y-Com and Link trade system set up here it’s hard to understand what your $20 a year is going to, however cheap it is. With the Global Trading System relocated to the smartphone app Pokemon Home, the online capabilities of Sword and Shield are actually a downgrade from the previous generation. But hey, Max Raid Battles are awesome.
The story is incredibly badly written. Not that I expect a lot from Pokemon stories, but this one was so purposeless and meandering that I started just skipping the cutscenes towards the end (at least they let you do that now). The characters are a mixed bag. Professor Ivy is so forgettable that I had to look up her name to write this review. I liked Sonia, Professor Ivy’s assistant, quite a lot. In anime we don’t often get female characters that are allowed to be both girly and very intelligent. Hop, your rival, is Hau from Sun and Moon but dumber and worse at Pokemon. Much more annoying, too. The champion, Leon, is his asshole older brother modeled after a professional English footballer. As much as he helps you out with a recommendation letter, he definitely has the presence of a hotshot professional athlete. Beating him is pretty satisfying, and he actually puts up a pretty good fight when you do take him on. The gym leaders are fairly interesting characters, and I remember like half of their names, which is better than usual. I definitely remember Nessa. And who could forget Ball Guy? Marnie, your other rival, is your cute teen goth girlfriend with a toxic fan club. Which is a good coaster into my next point.
Team Yell has set a new low for evil teams, and I say that with Team Galactic on the table. The follow-up for the brilliant Team Skull, is … a teenage girl’s fan club. They only reason they battle you is to try and deter you from the Pokemon League challenge so Marnie has a better shot at winning. They corner you, fight you, lose, get sad, and disappear. All without Marnie being aware of it. This is a 14-year old girl with a fan base of dozens of adult men and women, with nothing better to do than to humiliate themselves by losing Pokemon battles to a 14-year old kid over and over again. It is offensively dumb. They are weird, creepy, annoying, and we’d have been better off with no villains at all in Sword and Shield.
On to a few positive notes. After a year of jamming it out, I feel confident saying that this game has the best music in series history. All of the tracks, from the sleepy piano of the Slumbering Weald, to Toby Fox’s (Undertale) battle theme, to the rave party gym leader theme, are good as hell. It might be too good; the wild area theme evokes a sense of exploration and adventure that the wild area doesn’t manage to fulfill. There’s a wide variety of styles too, ranging all the way from ethereal folk songs to industrial metal. The punk aspects feel like a tribute to the UK’s stance as the birthplace of the genre, and it’s the small things that help to remind me a lot of people working on this game did care.
Gym battles are a massive upgrade, maybe my favorite new thing about this game. Instead of a small room with some lines drawn on the ground, gym battles are now a nationally televised spectator sport. You step into a full sized stadium packed with people, screaming and cheering. The EDM music pumps up. And the way that it builds, when the gym leader finally tosses out their last Pokemon and hits that Dynamax button, you can’t help but get excited.
I did not hate Dynamaxing as much as I wanted to. I was never a fan of mega evolutions because they were used in totally the wrong way. Salamence and Charizard and Gengar did not need megas. You know who did? Xatu, Octillery, Venomoth, Castform. Pokemon that are otherwise useless. Z-moves were fine by me, I liked that they evened things out even if I never used them. One thing they don’t tell you in the trailers — Dynamax can only be used against gym leaders and in online raids. That’s it. So 95% of the game, it basically doesn’t exist. If you’re offended by Dynamax, take a step back and try to figure out why you’re actually angry about this game. There are a lot of valid criticisms, as I’ve outlined here, but this mechanic that only pops up a dozen times in 40 hours isn’t the one to lean on. Some Pokemon get special Gigantamax forms, but I believe only ~30 so far. More are to come!
The wild area is nice — there was a lot of potential in this idea and they build on it well for the DLCs. If you connect to the internet while in the Wild Area, you’ll see avatars of hundreds of other players running around, creating a momentary illusion that you’re in the Pokemon MMO we’ve dreamed about since childhood. That illusion is shattered the moment you try to talk to anyone; the only thing that results from an interaction is a stock catchphrase and a random food item.
It may have taken 20 years to get here, but I can’t emphasize how much Pokemon Sword and Shield’s Wild Area is improved by the ability to control the camrea. The open world aesthetic, featuring Pokemon wandering around in the overworld feels amazing when it doesn’t look like Halo 2. I love seeing a herd of Koffings free floating while a Stonjourner watches in silence, plotting. A stoic-looking Beartic mother watches over its Cubchoos as they hunt for fish in the frozen lake. The freedom feels nice and for a few hours you can pretend they really did do a Pokemon: Breath of the Wild.
I love most of the new Pokemon. Some of the top tier designs are Toxtricity, Grapploct, Cursola, Stonjourner, Centiskorch, and Galarian Weezing. However, the starters were probably the worst Pokemon of the bunch. I love Sobble, and ended up picking it to continue my tradition of water starters over the last 20 years. The final evolutions are disappointing at best. Intelleon looks way too much like a person and approaches the uncanny valley; its animations are also laughably bad. Cinderace, Scorbunny’s final evolution, is actively bad. Rillaboom is probably the best starter final evolution and it’s still pretty bad. Some designs, like Mr. Rime, are downright upsetting. But all in all, it’s not a bad haul. Probably the best batch since Ruby and Sapphire.
EV and IV training is a lot easier now, as is breeding. You can just check IVs in your PC now and alter EVs either the standard way or with berries. You can also have like Pokemon teach egg moves to each other and use mints to alter a Pokemon’s nature. All in all, competitive has never been easier. Get into it!
I love the art style and designs of the new towns. Hammerlocke City has an awesome medieval aesthetic, Motosoke is cool and steampunk, and the ice town Circester is gorgeous. While the cities aren’t much bigger than they have been in the past, there’s a lot of background inaccessible area that makes it seem like thousands of people could actually be living there. It’s not much, but it’s something. And it’s worth noting that the visuals inside the towns look like a nice 2016 game rather than a 2006 game. Nothing impressive, but an upgrade for Pokemon for sure.
Out in the open world, there are Max Raid Dens where super powerful Dynamax Pokemon live. Group up with your friends (if you can figure out the convoluted online system) and co-op against a giant Gyarados, or whatever. I have done ~40 raid battles, all but a few online with at least one friend. Honestly, this rocks. In particular, the 10 or so battles I did a full team of four on voice comms were some of the most fun I’ve had all year. Trying to coordinate who gets to Dynamax with how many hits the shield has left is exciting, and everyone will end up scrambling to try and be the one in charge. Because of the shield mechanic in which the boss builds up shields every few turns, coordination is pretty much required for five star raids. At the end of the battle you get a chance to catch it, and out of the 40 raids I did only 2 Pokemon escaped.
In the first DLC, the Isle of Armor, you’ll travel to a nearby temperate island that I believe is based off the Isle of Mann. You’ll join a dojo, get a new incompetent and annoying rival, and run across the island doing quests for an eccentric martial arts master named Mustard. It was tedious and disappointing. The quests were honestly pretty tedious here, but the Isle of Armor offers a lot in the way of the whole island being a Wild Area. Full control of the camera and Pokemon walking around the overworld is worth the price of admission. It does at least provide some more content for endgame, but getting Urshifu at the end kind of feels like little reward for the tedium of battling a less-than-exciting new rival and chasing Slowpokes around the island. After you get Kubfu, however, also note that your lead Pokemon will walk around the overworld with you, so do that as quickly as possible. If you’re a fan of collectibles they’ve added hidden Digletts that act like Koroks seeds in Breath of the Wild.
I enjoyed the second DLC, The Crown Tundra, substantially more than the Isle of Armor. Although I disliked working with Peony, I kind of enjoyed Calyrex’s quest for the carrot and such, plus chasing the legendary birds around different areas was hilarious and way more rewarding than chasing Slowpokes. It was a lot of tedious backtracking but it kind of paid off with the Regi puzzles and discovering new areas. I once again lament how awful the environments look; they wouldn’t be out of place in Halo 2. Still, I am very happy that my Pokemon got to walk around the overworld with me again and that the whole Crown Tundra was wild area.
Overall, if you just want something else to do with your Pokemon, might as well grab the expansion pass. I recommend if it’s on sale — not really worth $30. It does help fill out the game, but the problems I had with the base game persist into the DLC.
Despite being unimpressive, rushed, or downright disrespectful to the brand at times, Pokemon Sword and Shield was probably the most fun I had with a game all year. The gym battles, Pokemon League system, and Raid Battles were all excellently done. The Wild Area, while looking like a PS2 game, had a lot of great ideas that could have been executed well with a few more months in the oven. The visuals an animations of this game are downright unacceptable in a 2019 game, let alone the biggest franchise in the world. But you won’t care about any of that when you get chased by Grapploct, the big blue wrestling octopus, into a lake as it tries to actually punch you. Because it is fun. This is a bad game. But after 40 hours traipsing through the Galar region, you’ll realize you don’t really care how good it is — it’s Pokemon. And that’s enough.
Of course in college being a nerd became cool again, and I distinctly remember the launch of XY when I was a junior. My roommate and I went to Gamestop on launch day squealing like actual children and each bought a 2DS and a copy each of X and Y. I was so unbelievably happy to be back. Pokemon has always been a place I felt I belonged. It’s a place of friendship, collecting fun and cool monsters, learning the power of teamwork, and becoming the best like no one ever was. My brother and I pretty much only ever played with Pokemon toys as kids. I had tons of plushes, played every spin off game, watched every episode of the show dozens if not hundreds of times. What I’m trying to say is that there is no media franchise more important to me than Pokemon.
Pokemon Sword and Shield is a Pokemon game. That may seem like a non-statement, but it’s perhaps the best summary I can muster. Pokemon is something that, because of its status as biggest franchise in the world as well as the biggest commonality between all of our childhoods, is impossible to review unbiased. If you reviewed Sword and Shield without having any prior experience with the series, I likely wouldn’t care about your review. Not because it’s invalid, but because we’d be seeing the game through two incomparable lenses. I am going to try and review this game as well as I can, but I want to confess up front it will be biased. As I said, I love Pokemon. It’s a huge part of my life. The main problem with trying to review this game is that no matter how bad it was, it was always going to be fun. Pokemon will never not be fun, no matter how bad it is. Such is a truth of the universe, and we’d all be happier if we’d just lay back and accept it.
The biggest negative of this game is not, in fact, the missing National Dex; Perhaps this is a bold statement, but Pokemon Sword and Shield would have been no better if it had featured all 900-something monsters. No, it is the frankly unacceptable visual and technical quality of the game, particularly the wild area. Already, here we are, exhibiting my previous point. This game’s quality is unacceptable, yet here I am accepting it because it is Pokemon.
The animations of Pokemon in the Wild Area (the open world online portion of the map) vary from unbelievable attention to detail to something that would have looked out of date in 2009. One minute you notice that Zigzagoon runs in zig zags like its name suggests and chuckle at it; the next minute you notice that Gyarados turns at sharp 90 degree angles as it swims like it’s a Disney World animatronic. The Wingull are floating on the breeze without flapping their wings like they’re supposed to, but, oh, that Hawlucha is running like a human man instead of flying. Pokemon based on prey animals run when they see you, those based on predator animals chase you when they see you to attack, and those that fit into neither category get confused and pause when seeing you. But once you move ten feet away from any Pokemon it vanishes in a puff of almost comical smoke.
The infamous image of the “N64 Tree” from the trailers is not a nitpick or out-of-context image. Every tree in the Wild Area looks like it’s straight out of Halo 2. The grass is rendered so badly I felt embarrassed for GameFreak while looking at it. The rocks, the dirt, rain. It all would have looked pretty bad in 2009. In 2019 it is, again, unacceptable. To use common parlance, this game looks like hot garbage. This is the biggest franchise in the world. The main series games should not look like hot garbage.
In the overworld, Pokemon are scaled appropriately to their recorded sizes. Step into a battle, however, and suddenly Caterpie is half the size of Wailord. Pokemon Colosseum, a game from 2002, had properly scaled Pokemon in battles. The graphical capabilities of the Switch are not the issue. Alongside Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8, Dragon Quest 11, Mario Odyssey, and Luigi’s Mansion 3… how could this game even be on the same system as those technical masterpieces? I can think of no explanation besides that the Galar Region’s map was made for 3DS and just blown up to 1080p as an afterthought.
The National Dex missing did not have the negative impact I had anticipated. I didn’t even notice, to be honest. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the game might be better for it. The smaller roster did allow for some forms of balance. I am upset my old team isn’t coming forward with me from Sun and Moon, but I left them on the Poke Pelago. They’ll be hanging out, eating beans, digging through the mines, and chilling in hot tubs for the rest of time. There are worse fates for the creatures I care about so deeply.
The game is not as long as previous versions, although that’s mostly due to the fact that it is the easiest game in the series — and that’s a pretty low bar. In fact, the only way I could create a challenge is to specifically avoid grinding at all. Fighting every trainer I saw, ignoring the wild area until the post game and never fighting wild Pokemon set me consistently at the perfect level to make each gym challenging and barely beatable. I slid through every gym on my last Pokemon with this method and felt that rush you only get when you beat that goon’s last dude with your guy in red health. Even for a children’s game, Pokemon Sword and Shield are much too easy. The permanent experience share unbalances the entire game and makes you much too powerful if you play the way you’ve played the other games. If you thought XY or Sun and Moon were too easy, those two are like hard mode compared to this.
The online experience has not improved much. Nintendo’s online functionalities continue to be lacking, and with the convoluted Y-Com and Link trade system set up here it’s hard to understand what your $20 a year is going to, however cheap it is. With the Global Trading System relocated to the smartphone app Pokemon Home, the online capabilities of Sword and Shield are actually a downgrade from the previous generation. But hey, Max Raid Battles are awesome.
The story is incredibly badly written. Not that I expect a lot from Pokemon stories, but this one was so purposeless and meandering that I started just skipping the cutscenes towards the end (at least they let you do that now). The characters are a mixed bag. Professor Ivy is so forgettable that I had to look up her name to write this review. I liked Sonia, Professor Ivy’s assistant, quite a lot. In anime we don’t often get female characters that are allowed to be both girly and very intelligent. Hop, your rival, is Hau from Sun and Moon but dumber and worse at Pokemon. Much more annoying, too. The champion, Leon, is his asshole older brother modeled after a professional English footballer. As much as he helps you out with a recommendation letter, he definitely has the presence of a hotshot professional athlete. Beating him is pretty satisfying, and he actually puts up a pretty good fight when you do take him on. The gym leaders are fairly interesting characters, and I remember like half of their names, which is better than usual. I definitely remember Nessa. And who could forget Ball Guy? Marnie, your other rival, is your cute teen goth girlfriend with a toxic fan club. Which is a good coaster into my next point.
Team Yell has set a new low for evil teams, and I say that with Team Galactic on the table. The follow-up for the brilliant Team Skull, is … a teenage girl’s fan club. They only reason they battle you is to try and deter you from the Pokemon League challenge so Marnie has a better shot at winning. They corner you, fight you, lose, get sad, and disappear. All without Marnie being aware of it. This is a 14-year old girl with a fan base of dozens of adult men and women, with nothing better to do than to humiliate themselves by losing Pokemon battles to a 14-year old kid over and over again. It is offensively dumb. They are weird, creepy, annoying, and we’d have been better off with no villains at all in Sword and Shield.
On to a few positive notes. After a year of jamming it out, I feel confident saying that this game has the best music in series history. All of the tracks, from the sleepy piano of the Slumbering Weald, to Toby Fox’s (Undertale) battle theme, to the rave party gym leader theme, are good as hell. It might be too good; the wild area theme evokes a sense of exploration and adventure that the wild area doesn’t manage to fulfill. There’s a wide variety of styles too, ranging all the way from ethereal folk songs to industrial metal. The punk aspects feel like a tribute to the UK’s stance as the birthplace of the genre, and it’s the small things that help to remind me a lot of people working on this game did care.
Gym battles are a massive upgrade, maybe my favorite new thing about this game. Instead of a small room with some lines drawn on the ground, gym battles are now a nationally televised spectator sport. You step into a full sized stadium packed with people, screaming and cheering. The EDM music pumps up. And the way that it builds, when the gym leader finally tosses out their last Pokemon and hits that Dynamax button, you can’t help but get excited.
I did not hate Dynamaxing as much as I wanted to. I was never a fan of mega evolutions because they were used in totally the wrong way. Salamence and Charizard and Gengar did not need megas. You know who did? Xatu, Octillery, Venomoth, Castform. Pokemon that are otherwise useless. Z-moves were fine by me, I liked that they evened things out even if I never used them. One thing they don’t tell you in the trailers — Dynamax can only be used against gym leaders and in online raids. That’s it. So 95% of the game, it basically doesn’t exist. If you’re offended by Dynamax, take a step back and try to figure out why you’re actually angry about this game. There are a lot of valid criticisms, as I’ve outlined here, but this mechanic that only pops up a dozen times in 40 hours isn’t the one to lean on. Some Pokemon get special Gigantamax forms, but I believe only ~30 so far. More are to come!
The wild area is nice — there was a lot of potential in this idea and they build on it well for the DLCs. If you connect to the internet while in the Wild Area, you’ll see avatars of hundreds of other players running around, creating a momentary illusion that you’re in the Pokemon MMO we’ve dreamed about since childhood. That illusion is shattered the moment you try to talk to anyone; the only thing that results from an interaction is a stock catchphrase and a random food item.
It may have taken 20 years to get here, but I can’t emphasize how much Pokemon Sword and Shield’s Wild Area is improved by the ability to control the camrea. The open world aesthetic, featuring Pokemon wandering around in the overworld feels amazing when it doesn’t look like Halo 2. I love seeing a herd of Koffings free floating while a Stonjourner watches in silence, plotting. A stoic-looking Beartic mother watches over its Cubchoos as they hunt for fish in the frozen lake. The freedom feels nice and for a few hours you can pretend they really did do a Pokemon: Breath of the Wild.
I love most of the new Pokemon. Some of the top tier designs are Toxtricity, Grapploct, Cursola, Stonjourner, Centiskorch, and Galarian Weezing. However, the starters were probably the worst Pokemon of the bunch. I love Sobble, and ended up picking it to continue my tradition of water starters over the last 20 years. The final evolutions are disappointing at best. Intelleon looks way too much like a person and approaches the uncanny valley; its animations are also laughably bad. Cinderace, Scorbunny’s final evolution, is actively bad. Rillaboom is probably the best starter final evolution and it’s still pretty bad. Some designs, like Mr. Rime, are downright upsetting. But all in all, it’s not a bad haul. Probably the best batch since Ruby and Sapphire.
EV and IV training is a lot easier now, as is breeding. You can just check IVs in your PC now and alter EVs either the standard way or with berries. You can also have like Pokemon teach egg moves to each other and use mints to alter a Pokemon’s nature. All in all, competitive has never been easier. Get into it!
I love the art style and designs of the new towns. Hammerlocke City has an awesome medieval aesthetic, Motosoke is cool and steampunk, and the ice town Circester is gorgeous. While the cities aren’t much bigger than they have been in the past, there’s a lot of background inaccessible area that makes it seem like thousands of people could actually be living there. It’s not much, but it’s something. And it’s worth noting that the visuals inside the towns look like a nice 2016 game rather than a 2006 game. Nothing impressive, but an upgrade for Pokemon for sure.
Out in the open world, there are Max Raid Dens where super powerful Dynamax Pokemon live. Group up with your friends (if you can figure out the convoluted online system) and co-op against a giant Gyarados, or whatever. I have done ~40 raid battles, all but a few online with at least one friend. Honestly, this rocks. In particular, the 10 or so battles I did a full team of four on voice comms were some of the most fun I’ve had all year. Trying to coordinate who gets to Dynamax with how many hits the shield has left is exciting, and everyone will end up scrambling to try and be the one in charge. Because of the shield mechanic in which the boss builds up shields every few turns, coordination is pretty much required for five star raids. At the end of the battle you get a chance to catch it, and out of the 40 raids I did only 2 Pokemon escaped.
In the first DLC, the Isle of Armor, you’ll travel to a nearby temperate island that I believe is based off the Isle of Mann. You’ll join a dojo, get a new incompetent and annoying rival, and run across the island doing quests for an eccentric martial arts master named Mustard. It was tedious and disappointing. The quests were honestly pretty tedious here, but the Isle of Armor offers a lot in the way of the whole island being a Wild Area. Full control of the camera and Pokemon walking around the overworld is worth the price of admission. It does at least provide some more content for endgame, but getting Urshifu at the end kind of feels like little reward for the tedium of battling a less-than-exciting new rival and chasing Slowpokes around the island. After you get Kubfu, however, also note that your lead Pokemon will walk around the overworld with you, so do that as quickly as possible. If you’re a fan of collectibles they’ve added hidden Digletts that act like Koroks seeds in Breath of the Wild.
I enjoyed the second DLC, The Crown Tundra, substantially more than the Isle of Armor. Although I disliked working with Peony, I kind of enjoyed Calyrex’s quest for the carrot and such, plus chasing the legendary birds around different areas was hilarious and way more rewarding than chasing Slowpokes. It was a lot of tedious backtracking but it kind of paid off with the Regi puzzles and discovering new areas. I once again lament how awful the environments look; they wouldn’t be out of place in Halo 2. Still, I am very happy that my Pokemon got to walk around the overworld with me again and that the whole Crown Tundra was wild area.
Overall, if you just want something else to do with your Pokemon, might as well grab the expansion pass. I recommend if it’s on sale — not really worth $30. It does help fill out the game, but the problems I had with the base game persist into the DLC.
Despite being unimpressive, rushed, or downright disrespectful to the brand at times, Pokemon Sword and Shield was probably the most fun I had with a game all year. The gym battles, Pokemon League system, and Raid Battles were all excellently done. The Wild Area, while looking like a PS2 game, had a lot of great ideas that could have been executed well with a few more months in the oven. The visuals an animations of this game are downright unacceptable in a 2019 game, let alone the biggest franchise in the world. But you won’t care about any of that when you get chased by Grapploct, the big blue wrestling octopus, into a lake as it tries to actually punch you. Because it is fun. This is a bad game. But after 40 hours traipsing through the Galar region, you’ll realize you don’t really care how good it is — it’s Pokemon. And that’s enough.