Nintendo announced today that the 8th generation Pokémon titles would be coming out on Nintendo Switch in late 2019 and be entitled Pokémon Sword and Shield. I'm excited! I have a lot of feelings about Pokémon and my interest in the series has waxed and waned over the years, but I've played through every main game in the series to date and I don't imagine that's going to change any time soon.
The landscape of Pokémon really did change drastically with the release of Pokémon GO and how it exploded in popularity. I have to wonder what kind of effect that could have on a new core RPG in the series. Sure, Pokémon Sun and Moon were technically released after the hit mobile game, but it was only a three month time frame so I don't imagine there would have really been any time for it to have an influence on the design of the game.
Pokémon Let's Go was definitely a reaction to the success of Pokémon GO in that it hybridizes elements of the mobile game with aspects of the original series. I have plans to dig into that game a little more in the coming months, but I have to say I'm not a fan of Pokémon GO itself just because it's a very transparent game. The augmented reality elements are neat, but for me it's not engaging as a game itself. From what I've played of Let's Go, it bridges the gap between the core series and the mobile game in some interesting ways, but it does seem to be effectively Pokémon Lite. The single player Pokémon experience isn't tremendously deep or challenging in the first place so I'm curious what I would get out of an ostensibly even more watered-down experience.
I think people tend to get a lot of different things out of Pokémon. For me, the series has always been fun because it affords me with the opportunity to assemble a team. I'm big on party composition in any game that allows you to do it, and Pokémon gives you a dizzying variety of ways to get a team together. Sure, there's not a pressing need to micromanage what your team has for the single player experience, but it's still fun to do. I would prefer if the games had at least the option for a higher difficulty level so it's necessary to make sure your team has type coverage instead of steamrolling through the opposition with a single high-powered critter.
On the other hand, there's a huge amount of strategy in playing against other human opponents. There's a diverse and complex metagame among the folks that play the game that way. I've dabbled in this myself and I understand how engaging that can be. I've never been a dedicated player of any competitive game, though, and the older I get, the more true this becomes. I've always craved a more challenging and interesting single-player experience in Pokémon because the mechanics certainly allow for it. I'm not getting my hopes up that this will happen in Sword and Shield, but I'm at least hoping that Game Freak learns from some of the mistakes Sun and Moon made in terms of over tutorializing and glacial storytelling.
I think Pokémon GO was successful because it focused on the core principle of the series and cut pretty much everything else out. Because of that, it was very accessible for a wide variety of people. I think it would be helpful for me to be optimistic and see Let's Go as a way of bridging the community of people who enjoyed GO into a more traditional Pokémon experience. I'm just wondering if there will be even more measures included in Sword and Shield to make the series accessible when if I had my way, the games would be including more elements to create depth. Maybe it's useless to speculate at this point and simply take reassurance from the fact that regardless of what happens, I'm going to be raising some cute monsters a few months from now.
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