This is beyond the usual low-hanging fruit people love to bring up about the mainline game series’ primary occupation being glorified dogfighting. (They like the fighting! It makes them happy! And so on.) By concerning itself with animals who are also sometimes gods and also sometimes, like, the spirits of the dead, Pokémon has never been quite as sanitized as its appearance suggests. It’s telling that one of the first Pokémon you meet in Pokopia is Drifloon, who’s infamous for Pokédex entries that note things like “Children holding them sometimes vanish.” (Which manages to even out-disturb Pokémon: Moon’s “If for some reason its body bursts, its soul spills out with a screaming sound.” Whoops!) There’s a reason that the franchise has veered more towards apocalyptic threats in recent years, as modern writers have come more thoroughly to terms with how scary, say, a big-ass crystal giraffe that can control the flow of time can be. Even animals we love can be fundamentally unknowable, and when you combine that with humanity’s tendency to imbue them with the uncontrollable powers of the natural world, it’s a recipe for disaster.
And yet, it feels just as important that whatever disaster sent humanity running in Pokopia, leaving their various tablet computers, junk piles, and exercise equipment standing idle, it’s implied to be at least partially human-derived. The logs you can come across in various ruins—sometimes providing new details to accompany your growing sense of cozy horror—make it clear that whatever was wrecking the world came on slow, as food and energy supplies began to dwindle. An early ocean-adjacent environment you stumble across is strewn with garbage—much to the delight of Trubbish, the adorable garbage rabbit—and it’s impossible, for an adult mind, not to draw comparisons to a world wracked by climate change and waste. (The fact that the game is essentially Wall-E Simulator 2026 doesn’t help on that latter count.) When Legendary Pokémon—those beasts with the ability to radically alter environments and ecosystems—begin popping up in Pokopia’s story, it’s to explain that humanity seemed to lose interest in them, not that one of their rogue members began wrecking things.
It’s part of the game’s charm that Pokopia is a non-harrowing post-apocalypse. (Compare its world, for instance, to Ultra Ruin, an utterly devastated post-apocalyptic world players traveled to in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, where the air is poison, and the only extant ‘mon is Guzzlord, a massive, trash-devouring monstrosity.) Sure, the Pokémon whose homes you build are a little sad that their humans are gone, but they’re also naively sure that, if they build things nicely enough, their absent gods will return to them. It’s a game where there’s no fighting—even though we have it on good authority that they like the fighting—and where the player can take no permanent harm. (Jumping off a tall ledge only causes your Ditto to briefly goop out of human form back into their original slime body.) Unlike, say, the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games—where humanity is also absent, but where intra-Pokémon violence is a necessity to stop planet-destroying threats—the suggestion is that the world is now a sort of perfect playground for monsters to live in peace, even as they work to ape the motions of their former masters. As long as the Pokémon Center PCs keep crapping out Life Coins to keep everybody in flower seeds, wall-mounted accessories and, uh, graves, it’s easy to imagine these creatures forming their own semi-functional society in perpetuity.
Post-apocalyptic stories can often feel rooted in hopelessness. But it feels important that Pokopia—like developer Omega Force’s earlier Dragon Quest Builders II, which it often closely resembles—tears the world down so that it can give players the chance to build it back up. You can’t fix something that hasn’t been broken, and Pokopia is a smart enough game that it takes both the breaking, and the fixing, seriously. For a series that once tended to default to kiddishness (as opposed to a far more respectful stance of kid-accessibile) it’s weirdly heartening to see it take the apocalypse seriously—even if it asks you to run around as a weird goofy little goop ball while doing it.
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