With Pokémon Let's Go Eevee/Pikachu being released before the eighth generation, there were high expectations upon Sword and Shield, as players hoped it would harness the new platform’s strengths to evolve upon aspects of the previous games and push the series forward once more. Expectations which, to me, were betrayed. It’s not that terrible a game, but it's still one that left me bitter with disappointment, as it took many steps back and saw TPC and Game Freak making some unsavory decisions for the franchise.
Pokemon SWSH takes place in Galar, a new region based on the UK. You play as a fledgling Pokemon Trainer that heads out on an adventure together with your first Pokémon and your friend Hop. Hop’s brother is none other than the Pokemon League champion, Leon, which means there are a lot of eyes on the two of you, with audiences expecting you to accomplish great things as you take on the region's Gym Challenge.
I will never understand why there was such a vocal portion of the fanbase who complained about Alola having trials instead of Gyms. It's bizarre how many will simultaneously demand sweeping changes, yet backlash about any deviation from the formula. Nevertheless, those folks got what they wanted: we’re back to having a pretty standard Pokemon League with eight badges to collect from eight gym leaders in eight different cities.
The quest for badges coming back isn’t inherently an issue, but it just so happens that its absence in Alola mitigated a long-standing issue in the series, that of the supporting cast quickly being forgotten. As much as I like, say, Kalos, it’s hard to remember anything about the characters in that game: every one of them was one dimensional, confined to one specific role in the story, from rivals, to Gym Leaders, to antagonists.
Alola, on the other hand, was brimming with personality, and neatly tied its characters together by means of either the trials in the Island Challenge, the foundation of the Pokémon League or the Aether Foundation plot. There were more defined character arcs, too, with everyone undergoing some kind of growth over the course of your journey. To me, this is what makes Sun and Moon so memorable, even if I had other issues with those games.
With Sword and Shield back to the standard formula, the ball is in their court to find a way to pull its characters into the spotlight more. And I think, to some extent, its designers got that. Galar has plenty of mysteries waiting to be untangled, as well as some of the best character designs in the series. In fact, most of the supporting cast of the game has something of a character arc waiting to happen.
Additionally, because of the League Championship around which the story is built, more screen time is given to the Gym leaders and the Champion, which means you’ll see plenty of them throughout the game, instead of beating them and forgetting about it. Even better, there's a suggestion of a greater plot involving the ancient history of Galar, relating to the region's Dynamax phenomenon as well as its ancient sites of Geoglyphs. All the while, the shadow of Macro Cosmos, Chairman Rose's energy company, looms over the region.
And... none of that ever goes anywhere. When it does, it does so in a muted and visibly cut back way.
Galar's ancient history disappears after the first few cities, being never mentioned again. Chairman Rose, a frightening antagonist whose benign façade hides a man capable of doing dangerous things, heel turns in a way so rushed it’s almost comical: he doesn't even get a proper hideout, or grunts, or anything. Oh, he gets an immensely menacing theme along with a battle intro animation that shows his conflicting feelings that an earlier version of the plot might have developed more. But that's it.
And it's not just Rose, there's several other characters whose development arcs appear incomplete in the final version of the game. Hop and Bede are other outrageous cases, two rivals with conflicting personalities whose fascinating developments... happen mostly off-screen. They leave the plot for a while, come back in, and now they're different. To say nothing about Leon's original rivals, who I learned more about playing Masters EX than their own game.
What's worse is that those cuts really didn't reflect in other areas of the game being necessarily better, as the only thing SWSH really has going for it is the anemic Wild Area. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how the Wild Area represented the first experiment towards the open world format that PLA and SV would iterate on and realize, but back when I first played the game, the Wild Area all but convinced me an open world Pokemon game would never work. And it is the only post game you get, as the only battle facility you get is extremely basic, and raid battles get old rather fast.
If anything, SWSH shone in the competitive scene. Dynamax, the new in-battle mechanic, replaced Megas and Z-Moves, and although the first impression made it seem like it would be busted and create a tedious, centralizing the metagame, I was wrong about it: Dynamax added an element of risk-assessment and flexibility that previous mechanics lacked, and contributed to decentralizing Pokémon picks. SwSh actually proved to have some of the most fascinating VGC metas in the history of the franchise, so I'll give it at least that: Dynamax is an improvement.
Oh, and the game has Galarian Ponyta. Galarian Ponyta is great. In fact, Galar really knocks it out of the park with the mon designs, and the Pokédex offers a great mix of old, new, and Galar form Pokémon. Of course, the fanbase didn't react well at all to the region’s available Pokémon, culminating in the Dexit "controversy", if you can call it that, where the fanbase proved once and for all that it's a toxic cesspool, filled with people prone to overreacting to pre-release information and who don't understand game development at all.
Now, Dexit was incredibly mismanaged by Game Freak's PR, I have to admit. GF initially claimed that it would be impossible to add old Pokémon via updates and/or DLC... and then turned around and did exactly that. A lot of headaches would have been avoided if they’d just said “DLC is coming, please be excited” from the start. Regardless, they'd announce the Armor Island and Crown Tundra showing only concept art, which was incredibly shady, and when it was revealed that these expansions were mostly new legendaries and more Wild Area... If you dig that, more power to you, but I was done expecting anything else from the games.
I lie, what really burned me out was the announcement for Pokémon HOME. The service was unveiled during a Nintendo investors meeting, which said a lot about who it's meant to benefit, and it turned out to be a replacement to Pokémon Bank that costed triple the price of its predecessor offering little more. It was a classic case of creating the problem and selling the solution: box count has remained the same since the 5th or 6th Gen, even though the variety of Pokémon and Forms has increased dramatically since then, and with Raids being a thing in this new game, and incentive to hunt and collect shinies, players started running out of box space.
The Pokémon Company helpfully sweeps in to create a way they can hold your Pokémon hostage for years to come -- well played! Not to mention that the whole thing was horrifically mismanaged, with delayed updates, as well as multiple technical issues which betrayed a lack of planning from TPC and its partners. If you're going to make a service that links multiple games, the first thing to do is to establish a few standards and ground rules. The multiple delayed updates to the application as well as bugs stemming from GO and BDSP integrations suggest to me they did anything but.
It’s so tiresome to talk about SWSH. I'm so glad PLA eventually came out, because Pokémon Sword and Shield made me very pessimistic for the future of the franchise. The game was more expensive, but not more ambitious, and in fact felt like a step back in many regards. Again, not terrible, perfectly possible to have fun with, especially for competitive or returning players, but not my thing.
Pokemon SWSH takes place in Galar, a new region based on the UK. You play as a fledgling Pokemon Trainer that heads out on an adventure together with your first Pokémon and your friend Hop. Hop’s brother is none other than the Pokemon League champion, Leon, which means there are a lot of eyes on the two of you, with audiences expecting you to accomplish great things as you take on the region's Gym Challenge.
I will never understand why there was such a vocal portion of the fanbase who complained about Alola having trials instead of Gyms. It's bizarre how many will simultaneously demand sweeping changes, yet backlash about any deviation from the formula. Nevertheless, those folks got what they wanted: we’re back to having a pretty standard Pokemon League with eight badges to collect from eight gym leaders in eight different cities.
The quest for badges coming back isn’t inherently an issue, but it just so happens that its absence in Alola mitigated a long-standing issue in the series, that of the supporting cast quickly being forgotten. As much as I like, say, Kalos, it’s hard to remember anything about the characters in that game: every one of them was one dimensional, confined to one specific role in the story, from rivals, to Gym Leaders, to antagonists.
Alola, on the other hand, was brimming with personality, and neatly tied its characters together by means of either the trials in the Island Challenge, the foundation of the Pokémon League or the Aether Foundation plot. There were more defined character arcs, too, with everyone undergoing some kind of growth over the course of your journey. To me, this is what makes Sun and Moon so memorable, even if I had other issues with those games.
With Sword and Shield back to the standard formula, the ball is in their court to find a way to pull its characters into the spotlight more. And I think, to some extent, its designers got that. Galar has plenty of mysteries waiting to be untangled, as well as some of the best character designs in the series. In fact, most of the supporting cast of the game has something of a character arc waiting to happen.
Additionally, because of the League Championship around which the story is built, more screen time is given to the Gym leaders and the Champion, which means you’ll see plenty of them throughout the game, instead of beating them and forgetting about it. Even better, there's a suggestion of a greater plot involving the ancient history of Galar, relating to the region's Dynamax phenomenon as well as its ancient sites of Geoglyphs. All the while, the shadow of Macro Cosmos, Chairman Rose's energy company, looms over the region.
And... none of that ever goes anywhere. When it does, it does so in a muted and visibly cut back way.
Galar's ancient history disappears after the first few cities, being never mentioned again. Chairman Rose, a frightening antagonist whose benign façade hides a man capable of doing dangerous things, heel turns in a way so rushed it’s almost comical: he doesn't even get a proper hideout, or grunts, or anything. Oh, he gets an immensely menacing theme along with a battle intro animation that shows his conflicting feelings that an earlier version of the plot might have developed more. But that's it.
And it's not just Rose, there's several other characters whose development arcs appear incomplete in the final version of the game. Hop and Bede are other outrageous cases, two rivals with conflicting personalities whose fascinating developments... happen mostly off-screen. They leave the plot for a while, come back in, and now they're different. To say nothing about Leon's original rivals, who I learned more about playing Masters EX than their own game.
What's worse is that those cuts really didn't reflect in other areas of the game being necessarily better, as the only thing SWSH really has going for it is the anemic Wild Area. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how the Wild Area represented the first experiment towards the open world format that PLA and SV would iterate on and realize, but back when I first played the game, the Wild Area all but convinced me an open world Pokemon game would never work. And it is the only post game you get, as the only battle facility you get is extremely basic, and raid battles get old rather fast.
If anything, SWSH shone in the competitive scene. Dynamax, the new in-battle mechanic, replaced Megas and Z-Moves, and although the first impression made it seem like it would be busted and create a tedious, centralizing the metagame, I was wrong about it: Dynamax added an element of risk-assessment and flexibility that previous mechanics lacked, and contributed to decentralizing Pokémon picks. SwSh actually proved to have some of the most fascinating VGC metas in the history of the franchise, so I'll give it at least that: Dynamax is an improvement.
Oh, and the game has Galarian Ponyta. Galarian Ponyta is great. In fact, Galar really knocks it out of the park with the mon designs, and the Pokédex offers a great mix of old, new, and Galar form Pokémon. Of course, the fanbase didn't react well at all to the region’s available Pokémon, culminating in the Dexit "controversy", if you can call it that, where the fanbase proved once and for all that it's a toxic cesspool, filled with people prone to overreacting to pre-release information and who don't understand game development at all.
Now, Dexit was incredibly mismanaged by Game Freak's PR, I have to admit. GF initially claimed that it would be impossible to add old Pokémon via updates and/or DLC... and then turned around and did exactly that. A lot of headaches would have been avoided if they’d just said “DLC is coming, please be excited” from the start. Regardless, they'd announce the Armor Island and Crown Tundra showing only concept art, which was incredibly shady, and when it was revealed that these expansions were mostly new legendaries and more Wild Area... If you dig that, more power to you, but I was done expecting anything else from the games.
I lie, what really burned me out was the announcement for Pokémon HOME. The service was unveiled during a Nintendo investors meeting, which said a lot about who it's meant to benefit, and it turned out to be a replacement to Pokémon Bank that costed triple the price of its predecessor offering little more. It was a classic case of creating the problem and selling the solution: box count has remained the same since the 5th or 6th Gen, even though the variety of Pokémon and Forms has increased dramatically since then, and with Raids being a thing in this new game, and incentive to hunt and collect shinies, players started running out of box space.
The Pokémon Company helpfully sweeps in to create a way they can hold your Pokémon hostage for years to come -- well played! Not to mention that the whole thing was horrifically mismanaged, with delayed updates, as well as multiple technical issues which betrayed a lack of planning from TPC and its partners. If you're going to make a service that links multiple games, the first thing to do is to establish a few standards and ground rules. The multiple delayed updates to the application as well as bugs stemming from GO and BDSP integrations suggest to me they did anything but.
It’s so tiresome to talk about SWSH. I'm so glad PLA eventually came out, because Pokémon Sword and Shield made me very pessimistic for the future of the franchise. The game was more expensive, but not more ambitious, and in fact felt like a step back in many regards. Again, not terrible, perfectly possible to have fun with, especially for competitive or returning players, but not my thing.