Pokémon Sword and Shield

If it wasn’t obvious from the multiple Pokémon projects on this site, I am a Pokémon fan. But that doesn’t mean I just happily consume everything the franchise produces. For years, I planned to forgo Sword and Shield entirely, because the Dexit controversy caused the games to be so heavily scrutinized with negative bias that they sounded like a nadir for the whole series. I eventually gave it a chance, only to find that almost every criticism I’d heard of it was true. Ironically, not the big one though – I think Dexit itself was overblown. While I understand the grievances others have with the erasure of over half of the full cast of Pokémon, no game in the series since Gen II has allowed more than a fraction of that total to be directly obtainable in a single game. The size and quality of this fraction is a much more significant factor in the quality of a Pokémon game as a standalone product, and this is one of the few areas where SwSh hit it out of the park.

As for the rest of the game, the campaign is filled with contrived railroading, annoying supporting characters, and obvious plot developments. It’s also very easy, even by series standards, as the efforts to eliminate grinding have worked too well and practically guarantee your party will be overleveled at every turn. The pseudo-open-world Wild Area is as technically embarrassing as I’d been led to believe, having the appearance, structure, and framerate of an amateur Unity test level. Even in the traditional areas, the lighting and textures often look terrible. Despite all of this, I still wasn’t considering these my least favourite mainline Pokémon games until the final quarter of the story. At that point, the remaining gameplay becomes blatantly phoned-in, and the narrative reveals an even stupider “climate activism but evil” trajectory than Ruby and Sapphire. And even after that, I probably spent more time with the online and post-game content than I normally do, because downloadable rental teams eliminate the usual requisite grind.

For its first three quarters, SwSh were kept afloat by simply playing to the franchise’s strengths. The simple addition of overworld Pokémon behaving and animating as Pokémon should, makes seeking out and acquiring new species more engaging than ever, especially in the Wild Area, even as severely undercooked as it is. The new creatures and the mechanics that accompany them have simultaneously become wackier, cooler, and cuter over time, as the designers continually push themselves to discover new ground. Finally, the new Dynamax feature is…fascinating, if not necessarily good. On the one hand, there’s next to no strategy to it in the main game, and it obliterated the balance of competitive singles. But on the other, it’s been surprisingly conducive to competitive doubles, which is the official format. Furthermore, its associated cooperative mode, the Max Raid Battle, is exactly the sort of thing I want from Pokémon gameplay. Overall, Game Freak has done with Sword and Shield what it always does: stumble through the most addicting gameplay formula in history. Its steps were just more misplaced than usual this time.